Growing Pains and Orange Bitters
by Serendipity1
Summary: Michelangelo experiences some new feelings towards his brother, and they're not exactly welcome. But the further you suppress something, the more it takes out of you, and it's only a matter of time before you just let it out.
1. these little earthquakes

**Growing Pains and Orange Bitters**

**Chapter One**: _these little earthquakes_

By: Serendipity

**Standard Disclaimer**: I, unfortunately, do not own the Ninja Turtles and anything else that applies to them, really. Nor have I rented them.

**Author's Notes**: It is interesting how much fanfic I write that is spawned from phone conversations. I seem to encounter quite a lot of slash in the fandom, but I missed the kind that is just made of awkwardness, and denial, and teenage hormonal outbursts, and yes, even brooding. Therefore, I set out to make one of my very own, and of course, it's about Michelangelo. Go figure. One-sided Michelangelo/Leonardo. Also, weird dream sequences.

* * *

Shockingly, he'd never really dwelled on the idea of sexual maturity, and he'd never even entertained the thought of romance. He was far too masculine and hardcore for that, and he had his comic books and superheroes, not weepy romance novels or whatever it was people read when they felt in the need for the crazy world of soaps. Also, he was pretty preoccupied with the whole saving-the-world gig. Not to say he'd been completely oblivious of the subject: how could he, with Master Splinter being so engaged in his soap marathons and Dawson's Creek and whatever else middle-aged housewife show he was watching at the moment? 

Also, they lived in New York and hung out at night. You'd have to be blind, deaf, and a toddler to be ignorant of sex in those circumstances. It'd be better to say that he'd never thought, really, of sex as it applied to _him_. Because it was too totally obvious that it didn't, and he never focused on stuff that wasn't important to his present life.

It came as an unwelcome surprise that while he might not be interested in the whole sex thing, Mother Nature and the almighty hormonal drive weren't on strike from working on _him_.

Okay, well, he'd be cool with this. He was a big boy now, and he knew all the failsafe methods of self-entertainment, courtesy of Playboy and some romance novels he'd snatched from April, via his mad ninja skills and a KFC bag. They were awful. They were poorly-written and boring and read like an ice cream commercial mixed with a lingerie ad with a heaping helping of Days of Our Lives. He felt they'd traumatized him for life and given him an unhealthy view of romance, and thought long and hard about telling April to burn all her books so she wouldn't be infected by the craziness. This idea was clearly suicidal, though, and so it was booted from his mind. Other than the bodice-ripper strangeness, sexuality might have been a welcome distraction from serious reality: hey, he welcomed all the distraction he could! Or at least he would have, if it hadn't come under the most inappropriate form in the world.

The whole hormone thing was sneaky. That is to say, it crept up on you gradually, bit by bit, lurked in the shadows, and then jumped on you, threw you to the ground, and beat you insenseless. It was rather like a ninja in that respect. An EVIL ninja.

Cupid, he reflected, was part of the Foot.

As it was, he wasn't entirely sure as to how he'd begun the whole attraction thing. It could have been at any point, because it was insidious, like mildew. It was strange to think of himself living a perfectly normal and healthy life, aside from the whole mutant ninja turtle thing, watching TV and playing Halo and defeating evil ninja hordes, when all the while this ticking time bomb THING was ever-presently expanding somewhere in the gland in his brain that Donny had mentioned once. It was weird, and it was awkward, and at some point, the whole thing had blossomed into fruition and made itself known.

Not only had it done this, maliciously intruding on his blissful and ignorant lifestyle, it had chosen the worst possible time for it to happen. Normal people didn't get strange inklings of where their interests lay during a fast-paced battle with robotic ninja after their blood. No, they usually got it over coffee or while staring dreamily into the sunset and reflecting about their lives. Other people were freaking _lucky_, he decided.

He couldn't remember just what he did wrong. He'd either struck an instant too late or had overestimated his opponent's weak point and became careless. Either way, the result was the same, and he ended up with the hilt of a katana thrust against his stomach with enough force to knock all the air out of his lungs. It might have even cracked ribs if he wasn't considerably armored in the chest region, something he'd been dizzily thankful for as he clutched at his stomach and wheezed and choked. He'd realized the mistake the instant his opponent's other blade lashed out at chest-level, with the intention of slicing at his hands and rendering him incapable of fighting. He remembered panicking stupidly about not being able to finish the latest Final Fantasy, something that really should have been the least of his troubles at that point.

Then there was a blurred movement of blue and green, and Leonardo's katana flashed into sight and knocked the enemy's sword away. In another swift, slashing blow, the enemy had other problems to worry about and he was saved from the fate of never being able to use hand-held video game controls.

He'd reached down for his dropped weapons and Leonardo had picked them up for him and their hands touched and he nearly fell over. Leonardo smiled and steadied him with his hand around his waist and said something, probably a crack about the whole clumsiness thing he was working, but Michelangelo hadn't really focused on that so much as the disturbing warm and tingling sensation that had sparked through him at the hand touch and the smile. He'd said something brilliantly witty in response to whatever Leonardo had said to him, grabbed his nunchaku, and decided that whatever that feeling was, it was a result of oxygen deprivation.

That conclusion would have been much easier to believe in if that incident had been the end of it. But of course it hadn't. That wouldn't have fit in with the whole turtle luck thing at all.

The next time it happened, they were out on a rooftop scoping out the surroundings in a generalized kind of way. That was to say, they hadn't encountered any criminal activity as of yet, aside from some cases of really bad hair, and one Purple Dragon wandering around stone drunk in that stage of inebriation that made people unable to communicate without pausing and slurring and stuttering.

This obviously wasn't a crime, it was funny. Funniness could never be criminal. It was down in the Comedian's Guide to Humor. Michelangelo wrote 'I Approve of this Scene of Public Drunkenness' on a post-it and stuck it on the guy's hairdo for the sheer fun of it. The whole night had seemed like it would be a cool one.

That was just an elaborate ruse to lull him into a false sense of security.

Raphael was making the pretense of standing watch to placate Leonardo, who was watching Donatello and Michelangelo banter on about some useless debate about Windows, smiling like some benevolent god upon his children. Which, Michelangelo decided, wasn't unnecessary deification or any hint of any un-paternal and non-platonic interest at all. It was just the way it was, and probably was the same with older brothers everywhere.

Anyway, the night sky was muddy black like it always was in the city, with the one sliver of moonlight to give it a chip of white. It looked like someone had nicked the sky with an exacto blade. The streetlights were on full blast down below, but this high up they just gave the impression of light, silhouetting Raph and Leo with something like a thin, white pencil line and tracing the contours of their muscles. His eyes stuck on that line like it was a magnet and followed the path from shoulders to chest. Leonardo's skin had a faint silver sheen to it, and it was kind of like stone-polished dark green.

Calling him 'like a statue' would be way too cliché, not that staring in some kind of crazed fixation at his brother's abs was helping his sanity plea much. _Come on Mikey_, _cut it out_, he told himself, _it's just muscles, I have muscles too. Pretty awesome muscles, if I don't mind saying so myself, which I don't, because I'm cooler than the new Coke. Why don't I just appreciate my own muscles like the king of awesome that I am, and look away before I freak out Leo. Come on eyes, I command you to move! The power of Mikey compels you!_

Leonardo turned and his obsession-causing muscles shifted fascinatingly and he said in his concerned, brotherly voice: "You okay, Mikey? You've been staring off into empty space for ages now."

With effort, he brought his gaze up to Leonardo's eye-level and laughed. "Empty space? No way, dude. If I wanted a look at that, I'd just stare at Raph's head. No space emptier'n that!" He tried really hard to believe that something about Leonardo's voice had made the disturbing tingle run through him again, because it was a cold night out and who knew how bodies reacted to the cold. His abused logical side kept screaming at him that his nether regions totally wouldn't react like that to cold, but he ignored that dose of reality. Who needed it? Donny could have it all.

Raphael said something. Once again, his focus was totally off and he didn't get what he said, but the others seemed to find it pretty funny. _He_ was busy searching the streets for any signs of crime with a desperation borne of distress. After all, New York was supposed to be a crime capitol. Where was all that crime and chaos when it could be used as a distraction? How could crime just take a break when he needed it to show its dark underbelly? And crapola on a crumpet, he was now praying for some gang violence.

Around that point, the denial phase began to die a slow death. Something was definitely wrong with him.

When they arrived at the lair, Michelangelo made a beeline for his room. It was his haven, his Batcave, his Fortress of Mikey Solitude and Entertainment. He was pretty solidly sure that no one would bother him until the time came for one of Master Splinter's long and involved training exercises, and it was a long way from dinner. This gave him maximum private time to collect his thoughts and to try and pin down the whole possible 'lusting over his brother' problem. This was obviously not a dilemma that could be solved with tabletop gaming sheets and action figures, and no way did he want any written account of this to be used against him.

There was only one option left to him. Meditating. This was usually the forte of Master Splinter and Leo, but he was willing to try anything at this point. And anyway, the whole meditation business was supposed to clear the mind and be relaxing. He couldn't see any problem with clearing the mind and relaxing. It would only benefit him to be not thinking of anything, because he was still getting horrible flashes of muscles in the moonlight.

Obviously, this required incense. He rummaged through the boxes in the hall closet and came out with a double handful of scent-encrusted sticks with names like 'champak', 'sandalwood', and 'patchouli', whatever kind of smells those were, and stuck them in blobs of play-dough in a large circle on his floor. He had to shift a lot of the stuff that was on there, such as his comic book collection (circa 1983, 1987, and 1994,) a stack of action figures with legs and arms snapped off that he never got around to salvaging, and some melted waxy-looking thing that might have been a candle or some melted firecracker.

One of the superhero action figures posed heroically atop the broken junk heap, one arm raised in a kind of mock tribute.

"We who are about to die salute you," Michelangelo told it gravely, then arranged his body in the awkward psuedo-lotus position and began to meditate as best he knew how. This was a weighty task, since he really didn't know how to meditate very well at all. It usually made him extremely bored, then restless, then narcoleptic. At that point in his life, he had a Pavlovian response to meditation: it would make him very paranoid that at some point, out of nowhere, a walking stick would descend from the heavens and whack him on the head.

Pretty soon, the stench of the combined incense sticks hung murkily in his room, as thick and dense as swamp fog, and he decided that the burning pain in his head was either an incoming epiphany or a godawful migraine brought on by whatever ungodly witch-perfume Master Splinter had slathered on the incense. It felt like he'd been sitting there for the span of an eternity, taken a brief break for Armageddon, waited for the universe to restart, and then lingered in champak-scented Hell for another eternity. In reality, he grudgingly supposed it had been at least an hour. A wasted hour, he decided, an hour that could have been happily spent killing brain cells on the playstation or even going through weapons drills. A wonderful hour, full of glorious potential that had been utterly wasted by this strangeness.

Michelangelo decided he'd had enough meditation for one lifetime, and stood up. The first thing he noticed was his room, and the changes it had gone through. It was still an awful, tasteful dump, but red satin tablecloths were now draped smartly over most of the heaps and over his bed. Cream and crimson candles burned seductively in every available corner, and for some reason an evocative scent was whimsically trailing through the air. It actually smelled like black olive pizza and the faint remnant of the New Age store scent left behind from his attempt at inner reflection. The action figure was seated at an organ-grinder's cart, pointing at the doorway as a strange tune clinked and plinked away.

All in all, it was all very unusual. It was freakin' _weird_.

Suddenly, the door swung outward, framing his visitor with a halo of brilliant, golden light that could never have come from the halogen lamps of the lair. Leonardo stood there, a hand on his hip, a fedora perched jauntily on his head, and a smooth and debonair smile that was entirely alien to his face. "Michelangelo," he said, as if he was tasting every vowel of his name on his tongue, "I've come to take you away from all this."

In a normal reality, Michelangelo would have either screamed and scrabbled for safety or cracked up laughing. Instead, he batted his eyes in dismayed coquettishness and fawned. "Oh heavens, Mr. Leonardo," he crooned in a terrible Southern Belle accent, "Thank goodness you came! That horrible Sheriff Splinter said he was selling the ranch, and me and the chickens have nowhere else to go!" As if on cue, he heard a series of faint clucks from behind his closet door.

Leonardo entered the room with the leisurely near-swagger that was the trademark of romantic heroes everywhere, and Michelangelo took the time to notice the drifting fragrance of some sort of prototype masculine cologne as his older brother stopped half a foot in front of him and fixed him with a look that involved great, melting-chocolate eyes and a big, gushy smile. "I have the battleshell all ready to go," he whispered huskily, as if stricken with desire, "We can be in Utah by the morning."

"I love Utah," Michelangelo said, "But whatever will the neighbors think?" Meanwhile, his conscious mind was trapped and screaming in this strange Gone With The Wind puppet body that seemed liable to sprout a gown and boobs at any conceivable moment. _Utah? _It screamed in rage, _You don't know anything about Utah! Isn't that some flat cornfield wasteland? What are you going to do in cornfield wasteland? And why does Leo smell like Tommy Hillfiger and Old Spice? Make the madness end before he does something impossibly bizarro crazy!_

"Frankly, my dear," said Bizarro World Leo, "I don't give a damn."

Suddenly the imperious ringing of church bells sounded out, and glorious organ music piped from an unknown source. A glance backwards told him that it was coming from what used to be the organ grinder's cart: now it was a miniature pipe organ, sounding out beautiful, mellow notes. His action figure was stuck in the pipes, pointing at him in what looked like recrimination.

Leonardo knelt down on one knee as fog machine smoke trailed wispily around him, framing him in romantic mist. "Michelangelo Percival Garcia Hamato," he intoned elegantly, "I say Hamato only for lack of an actual surname…will you do me the honor of becoming my bride?"

_No! No! You don't have the ankles for skirts anyway! You are manly and macho! Walk away before the pipe organ turns into something else! And you don't have any middle names! _"I do declare, sir," he giggled, as his mind filled with unspeakable horror, "I do believe I shall faint!"

At that point, Michelangelo ripped himself out of REM cycle with a shrill, piercing scream, unafraid of whatever walking sticks hovered menacingly in the real world to attack him there. His room was fogged with thick, fragrant smoke. He screamed again, for lack of anything better to do or say.

The door swung outward in identical force to his horrendous dream door, and there, framed in the thick, smoky light, stood Leonardo. "What's going on in there?" he asked, concern evident in every syllable.

"Get away from me, you romance novel bastard!" he screamed, totally obscured by incense smoke, "I refuse to feel the love tonight!"

"What?" Leonardo asked, completely nonplussed. Somewhere in the hallway, footsteps rang out as his other brothers rushed on the scene to perform what was obviously a search and rescue mission that required the Jaws of Life. They stopped at the door and were mystified by the billowing clouds of sandalwood and patchouli.

"Mikey? Mikey! Don't worry, I have the fire extinguisher!" Donatello yelled from the edge of the doorway, brandishing the nozzle menacingly at the smoke. "If you can hear me, say something!"

"I'm cool, guys!" Michelangelo called from his smoky prison, glad no one could see his expression, "I'm, uh…meditating," he added lamely. "It's helping me relax," he said, inserting a question mark at the end, as if unsure about its results.

There was a period of silence as his brothers allowed the import of this statement to sink in.

"You're meditating?" asked Leonardo in sheer disbelief, "In your own free recreational time?"

Donatello raised the nozzle again and aimed it like the barrel of a gun in the general area of the room. "All right," he said in a deep and serious tone, "Whatever evil alien life form you are, show yourself and tell us what you did with the real Michelangelo."

"And tell us why you wanna burn his room," Raphael added, "I mean, you wanna get rid of all the garbage, I can see that, but you could've just _asked_."

"Oh, ha ha. Veerrry funny, Raph. Yeah, your rapier wit stops me dead in my tracks," Michelangelo replied. With a sense of growing horror he realized his legs had fallen asleep and were now afire with the dreadful pins and needles sensation. He didn't want them walking in before, but now it was, like, a mission objective to Keep Them Away. If they found out about the legs being asleep, he'd have to suffer shock-inducing finger jabs, and that would just put the cherry on the top of the humongous crap-cake that was his day.

"He mentioned something about romance novels," said Leonardo thoughtfully.

"Is he burning them in protest?" asked Raphael. "Man, Mikey, we understand your pain about not landing Prince Charming, but don't take it out on the books! You gotta get a hold of yourself, bro! Join a support group or something!"

"You really should control those violent urges, Mikey," said Donatello, and Michelangelo pondered the benefits of just ignoring the uncomfortable pins and needles jabbing in his legs in favor of launching a frontal attack.

"How much incense did you _use_?" asked Leonardo as fog rolled out in a continuous carpet from the room.

"Um," said Michelangelo guiltily, hardly visible in the perfume cloud.

"Jeez, you must have used something like twenty sticks to get this kind of result," Donatello said, sounding both disgusted and somewhat admiring, "Could it have killed you to use all the same kind? It smells like someone dropped a bomb in the perfume aisle at Macy's."

"It smells like burnt dead dogshit," said Raphael in his usual tactful and eloquent manner.

"That must be the sandalwood," said Leonardo.

"Look," Michelangelo said, mired in the olfactory equivalent of a nuclear bomb, "I _like_ it, okay? Is that okay with you guys? It's a new experience. It's different and unique. I'm trying something new," he continued as the last of the incense burned into golden embers in their Play-Dough holders, "I read a New Age book and thought this looked cool, so…maybe I overdid it a little on the incense. I could have added too much, who knows. But I gotta say, my soul feels minty fresh and sparkling now."

They stared at him. He stared back, secure in his relative invisibility.

His legs were now capable of bearing his weight, so he leapt to his feet and clung to the door. "Well, it's been great seeing you guys, glad to know the whole neighborhood watch program is still up and running, thanks for your support, and have a good night. I'd totally talk to you guys and invite you in for tea, but I don't think I can find it right now, so…yeah. LEAVE MY BATCAVE!" With that, he closed the door in their faces.

"Incense," he heard Donatello groan from behind the door, "It's going to take forever to get that smell out of there. We're underground in a small space, and what does he do? He fills it up with stench."

"Look on the bright side," Raphael said, "If we ever need to meditate, we won't need to burn anything. We can all just go to Mikey's room."

* * *

There was no questioning it. He liked Leo a lot. Like, in the _like_ like sense, not the normal and healthy: 'Oh, he's my brother and I love him in that comfortable and fraternal and completely platonic way.' It was in the way that turned his guts to mushy liquid whenever he walked by, the way that filled him with strange and self-conscious paranoia. The way that made him constantly check for spinach in his teeth, and kept him awake at night agonizing over it until three AM, tending a monster headache and snacking on Doritos until he fell into a hazy kind of sleep. That whole romantic attraction thing was like a very bad virus. 

Suddenly, Leonardo was everywhere. Of course, that was true in a very literal and totally non-metaphorical way, seeing that he had to live with him, but aside from the obvious, he seemed to be on his mind a lot more than anything else. The only thing that had previously been on his mind so much was the wonderful world of comic books, but even it took second place to Leonardo now. That was insanely blasphemous.

He could be doing something as commonplace as washing dishes when he'd focus on something really stupid about his brother. Like, wondering if he was polishing his swords now and running something like a mini video reel of how he looked when he did it: gently and fastidiously, with his fingers running down the length of the blade in slow strokes and his brows furrowed in concentration. The way he smelled like oil afterwards. Those thoughts would lead to places he didn't even want to speculate: he spent his time thinking in broken fragments that he'd hastily end before they went too far. Of course, with frightening single-mindedness, his brain always returned to the same place.

Michelangelo was absentmindedly drawing doodles of Superman on his sketchpad in blue crayon when a hand came out of nowhere and gave him a light smack on the head.

"Auuugh!" he dropped the paper and crayon like they'd come straight from the oven and spun to face what was obviously a malicious attacker. It wasn't, of course, it was just Leonardo staring at him like he'd grown two heads, clearly curious as to why his younger brother was acting like a neurotic flea.

"Hey man, no ninja stuff when I'm drawing. I gotta tune into my inner Picasso, and I can't do that when you're zipping around and popping up out of the shadows. It's, like, bad for the sympathetic art vibrations," Michelangelo said, trying to sound righteously affronted.

''Yeah. Uh-huh. Sure," Leonardo said, sounding unimpressed. This was because he didn't comprehend the delicate nature of genius.

"You can ruin a whole picture like that! One minute, you're coloring in the Mona Lisa, then some dude comes up out of nowhere and BAM!" he made an exaggerated hand movement, "ALL GONE! The work of years, ruined! It's important, you know. Gotta respect an artiste's space." He congratulated himself on how totally natural and calm he was being, faced with the vision that was Leonardo. Then he subtracted all of his points for thinking like that.

"Well, Picasso, training starts in three minutes." Leonardo's eyes narrowed as he looked at the drawing in his sketchbook and he let out a sigh. "Oh, no. Please don't tell me you're trying to dress us all up as superheroes again."

"Huh?" he glanced at the book in his hand and noticed that, while what he'd been drawing was clearly attired in a Superman outfit and flowing cape, it was also obviously not the ruggedly handsome Clark Kent. It was completely recognizable as a mutant turtle with twin katanas, hovering in mid-air in a heroic pose. "Oh. Ha ha. Yeah. Whoops," he said quickly shutting the book and hiding the evidence, "Artistic license, bro. Can't mess with artistic license."

Leonardo made sort of an indifferent noise and turned to go immerse himself in his obsession: training in ninjitsu. Michelangelo watched him go with an insanely stretched out goofy grin that would have been a dead giveaway had anybody been watching.

When it was clear that he was alone, he opened his sketchbook, yanked out the SuperLeo, and crumpled it into a little ball, calling himself an enormous idiot the whole time. It was leaking into his sketchbook now! Nothing was safe! Nothing was sacred! Very soon, it would take over something else that he treasured in his life, swallowing it like a great sucking blob of dark goo. He tried to throw the picture away, but ended up tucking it under his bed. It was a good picture, anyway. Michelangelo liked the flowing bandanna particularly. It added a nice touch.

A couple minutes after hiding the evidence, he appeared at the dojo and attempted to look vigorously normal.

"What's the matter with _you_?" asked Raphael, staring at him as if he'd caught the plague, "You get lockjaw?"

"I resent that," Michelangelo said through his frightening, shining grin, "You're just jealous of how handsome I am when I smile. It's great. You should try it sometime. Turn your frown upside down!" he added with unconvincing cheer.

"Who turned you into a Stepford Wife?"

"I am _not_ a wife!" he shrieked with more force than was strictly necessary. Noting Raphael's surprised look, he decided that now was the time for clever evasive maneuvering. "Oh, look! Weapons!" he said gleefully, and ran over so to appear completely overcome by the sheer coolness of their weapons rack. The fact that he was looking more at the rack itself than the actual weapons kind of detracted from the whole thing.

He let out a silent cheer when Donatello finally pulled himself from the grip of Technology and arrived on the scene for their afternoon sparring session. Finally, he thought with a measure of grim anticipation, something to achieve the whole 'clearing the mind' goal. Meditation hadn't worked, reading hadn't worked, and the latest Sega game hadn't worked at all. So far he was able to briefly escape the encroaching urges of his hormones through sheer testosterone-laden exercises. This worried him. It seemed like such a Raphael thing to do. Something about the whole 'fighting for stress relief' struck him as a step towards the long road of masochism.

Leonardo paired off with him. This didn't bother him aside from the usual reaction of: 'Oh god, the slave driver has come for me!' Fighting didn't really kick off those strange attraction pulses. Or at least, not any more than some other activities he could name. There was really nothing fun or romantically charged about a fist to the gut or a roundhouse kick to the back, or at least not at that moment in his life. If his sexual preferences were getting as warped as they were right now, he gave it only a matter of time before he started getting turned on by blood and pain. And then it would be the whip fetishes. Oh, god the whip fetishes and leather! It burned the mind to think of!

"Focus," snapped Leonardo, and he caught the kick just in time, ducked under it and attempted to get through his guard with an arcing right hook toward his unprotected chest. Leonardo just grabbed his fist with one hand and yanked him forward to meet with an uppercut to the stomach that made him see stars.

He broke free and rolled to a standing position, circling as he got his breath back. "Hey, _ow_," he said with a grin, "I'm awake, Mommy, I don't want to go to school." Leo didn't look amused, which was only to be expected. He took a moment to thank whatever providence was responsible for them not practicing with the weapons at that time: getting struck with a fist was a lot less painful than the flat of a blade. The whole sword-smacking thing was a worrying trait that must have developed under the cane-whacking of Master Splinter.

The next punch from Leonardo came without even a muscle tightening to signify his attack, which was pretty much par for the course as far as his surprise attacks went. Michelangelo took the blow and the one immediately following that, an almost mechanical sequence of hits aimed precisely, of course, at the chest and jawline. It was obvious he was pulling on the second one and Michelangelo took shameless advantage of that, moving into the blow and executing a perfect kick to Leonardo's side, knocking him back a few paces.

This left an impasse as they came to a good old fashioned stand-off, and Michelangelo paid a studious lack of attention to Leonardo's breathing patterns and how his skin looked when it was sweaty. Screw taking it easy during practice, he couldn't get suitably and thoroughly distracted from his little problem if Leonardo wasn't playing right.

"Don't worry, Leo," he said, trying for the tones of intense smug-itude that so ticked off his brothers, "I'll go easy on you. I know you're intimidated because, see, I'm the Battle Nexus champion! I-" he dodged the inevitable blow to the head with a surge of giddy relief. He was getting angry! He would start being freaky Leonardo-style _serious_! Michelangelo was happy about this, and it frightened him to some extent. But not enough to let up on the good old sparring ritual of taunting his opponent.

After a few rounds of getting pummeled mercilessly, he began to doubt the wisdom of that idea.

Michelangelo jumped backwards, keeping out of kicking range, and stayed at the edge of the mat. Leonardo kept on waiting for him to make a move. After a few minutes, he said so with a certain amount of frustration. Michelangelo made it clear that he knew what was expected of him, he just didn't care.

"Attack? Oh, no, no sir. I _like_ it here," he said, feeling jubilant in his ability to tick people off, "No one punching me, no kicking, no beatings of any sort! I think I'll bring out some popcorn," he added, and jumped up as Leonardo took things in his own hands and charged him.

Michelangelo sprung in the air and grabbed Leonardo's shoulder so as to flip over his shell, but all of that went horribly awry as Leo, apparently expecting that method of escape, used both his arms to grab him and slam him down, shell-first, on the floor. He took this in stride, kicked Leonardo's legs out from under him, and prepared to stand up and go forth into battle mode once more.

Then, Leonardo rolled on top of him and pinned him to the floor. As far as moves went, it wasn't really the most devastating in the whole ninja arsenal. In fact, it wasn't even the best choice of moves to use against him, since he was mind-bogglingly slippery and full of dexterity.

Of course, there was another force beyond pure tactics at work here, and it was making it really hard for him to breathe right. Leonardo shifted slightly, enough to clamp his legs more tightly against his sides, pressing skin against skin. Michelangelo could actually feel his pulse. This wasn't doing wonders for his own, which was racing back and forth in his chest like he was on some drug.

He was suddenly hugely and uncomfortably aware of just how close their bodies were: how he could hear Leo's breath coming out in short, halting bursts. So, he did something very stupid. He struggled. It was just pure instinct. Even though the better thing to do at that point would be to take advantage of the fact that Leonardo hadn't yet secured his arms, he squirmed in pure panic at being caught underneath him, panic at the heady rush of sensations that flooded him with insane speed.

Struggling wasn't the brightest idea, because all that did was make Leonardo pin his arms down to keep him from trying to jump up, and that caused panic to spike right into desperation. At that moment, he really didn't care if Karai came in on an iron-clad dragon that spat liquid fire and ate metal, followed by an innumerable legion of Karai-bots armed with rocket-launchers. As long as SOMETHING got Leonardo to stop straddling him, he would worship the very ground whatever that distraction was walked on.

"You know," he said, his voice coming out at a much higher pitch than usual, "I'm, uh, I think that's it for me. I give up. Seriously, I give."

Leonardo blinked at him stupidly, but did not, Michelangelo noted with growing frustration, release his arms. "You're not fighting back?"

"Nope. No, I think I used up my defensive maneuver quota. Yup, definitely all used up. No way to be replenished in sight. Gee, it would be really awesome if I could just _get up_," he hinted strongly.

"Not that easy, Mikey," Leonardo's eyes narrowed.

"Easy? _Easy_? What? I surrender! I'm done for! Finito! The end," he cried desperately, trying really hard not to shift or otherwise move while Leo was on top of him, "Do you need me to sing Yankee Doodle? I could so sing that for you, bro. With a hat on. Just get off! Seriously! You're totally cutting off my air supply!" He tried an impotent, half-hearted shove and ended up getting his arms an inch off of the floor. He was somewhat conscious of Donatello and Raphael watching in total befuddlement, but it was really hard to concentrate on anything but his situation and the jittery, tense voice screaming "_Trapped! Trapped_!" inside his head.

"Leonardo is correct, Michelangelo. In combat, your enemy will not accept surrender. Your training must reflect the situations you are likely to encounter," Master Splinter said, finalizing his doom.

"I don't remember any member of the Foot being this heavy," Michelangelo said, determined to argue his way out of it.

"Hun?"

"Dude. If Hun sits on me, I'm going to worry more about my organs getting crushed by my broken bones."

"Michelangelo!" snapped Master Splinter, "No more talking!"

And there he was, being pinned and straddled by his illegitimate crush, who seemed capable of boundless patience and possessed of the ability to double his own weight, and it looked like he was in no hurry to get up any time soon. In fact, it looked like he was happy to stay there, on top of him, all day. And if the situation was different, he would have been totally and strangely happy with the concept. As it was, Michelangelo was ready to damn the practice of sparring to the very lowest pit of the abyss.

What followed was what he chalked down as one of the most horribly awkward experiences of his entire, short life. He struggled, writhed, bucked upward repeatedly with a sense of horrific embarrassment and eventually resorted to whining in between futile, muted struggling.

"Pleeease," he whined for what felt like the seven-hundredth time.

"No."

"Seriously! Seriously, I really need to get up right now!"

"There is no reason you need up that badly."

"_You have no idea_."

"Not until you actually start trying, Mikey. You're just fidgeting around! This is not a game!"

"My GOD!" he finally snapped, "What is WRONG with you people? Let's just pretend I'm dead right now, okay? I'm gone! There's a katana sticking out of my ribs and my blood is spilling poetically out onto the floor! There is no way, I say, no WAY in any world or any strange transdimensional universe that a Foot, or a Purple Dragon, or the Shredder, or…I dunno, even Bishop would drag this fight out this long! I would not be here, okay? I would be gone! Get off right now! Get OFF!"

With that, he drew upon his reserves of pent-up frustration and annoyance to achieve a higher level of strength and with a huge shove that involved him nearly shooting up from the floor, managed to dislodge Leo. Before he made any other sudden movements, Michelangelo jumped backwards a few feet and edged away, bumping into Donatello as he did so and nearly knocking him over.

"Geez, what's up with you?" Raph asked in his usual surly way.

Michelangelo was not in the mood for the dulcet tones of Raphael's prodding. He was too busy attempting to get himself back to the good old Mikey groove of calm, serenity, and sugar-highs, and there would be no distraction when that mighty task was at hand! There would be only soothing thoughts of the Justice Force. This called to mind Leonardo dressed like Superman and he shook his head as if to dislodge all disturbing thoughts from his brain. "I'm fine!" he insisted, backing up in a new and brother-free direction, "I just…really need to go to the bathroom! The call of nature is strong in this one! Yeah! And that's why I really wanted you off of me, too!" he pointed accusingly at Leo, "Because I wanted to go to the bathroom! Okay?"

Leonardo just stared at him.

"So…off I go," Michelangelo said, looking convincingly desperate, "To the bathroom. And when I come back, I will train some more! Yes," he added, and fled. In his wake, his very puzzled siblings conveyed their befuddlement with expressions and shrugs. Michelangelo ignored this. He would go to the restroom, he would pull himself the jolly fuck together, and training would resume as normal, because there was totally nothing wrong with him.

* * *

"There is something horribly wrong with me," he muttered indistinctly with his head under the bathtub faucet. Cold water gushed from the spigot, onto his head and into his mouth and eyes and he watched it swirl into the drain. The beginnings of what felt like an impressive stress headache were starting up. 

He wasn't the beam of scary super-genius that Donatello was, and he couldn't pass for intellectual even in bad light, but it didn't take a rocket scientist to know that what he was feeling was plain out Not Right. It was pure and undiluted sexual lust, which was weird and awkward enough, but having it focused on his _brothe_r? Dude, that was the guy he'd stolen cookies from and took baths with! And that last line did nothing at all to help the situation. He turned the faucet off, for it was clear that it was no longer helping, and went in search of enlightenment.

The first time it happened he'd stayed in his refuge, the bathroom, for as long as he could convincingly pretend to be heeding the call of nature. Afterwards, practice was an elaborate and intricate dance as he tried to elude Leonardo's attacks and keep him, at all costs, from ever pouncing on him again. Still, he couldn't stop everything, and once in a while he'd end up on his back on the mat, his breathing and heart rate doing all kinds of funny things and his mind going completely and embarrassingly one track.

Not to mention that Leonardo looked unbelievably good when he was sparring.

That thought didn't occur to him.

At least, not any more than five times a session.

This always ended in the only way it could. He would dash madly for the bathroom to hit the showers first, and demanded that he be given first rights out of everyone for his cold showers.

"_Cold_ showers?" Donatello asked in complete disbelief. Raphael and Leonardo had similar expressions.

"Yeah. So?" he'd demanded rebelliously.

"Mikey, you hate cold showers," Raphael said, as if reminding him of some pivotal fact of nature, such as the sky being blue or Master Splinter being a giant rat.

"No, I don't," he'd denied heatedly, "I happen to LOVE cold showers. The best thing you can do with water is make it ice cold and BATHE in it. I hereby dedicate my life to taking them. That's how much I love cold showers. Because I love them just that much."

"But…" Donatello tried to object.

"Cold showers are GOD," he'd snapped, and slammed the door on their confused faces.

The little subversive element in his brain that told him what Leo didn't know couldn't hurt him and that he might as well enjoy it was totally not helping. In fact, it was making it completely impossible for him to focus on the actual fight, what with one section of his brain neatly set aside to perform interventions for the alien, dangerous part that wanted nothing more than for Leonardo to jump on top of him. This, he informed himself angrily, was _sick_, and he would not in any way allow his budding libido to cripple him in this way. Of course, the fact that he said this constantly like some warped little mantra while being completely owned in sparring was completely coincidental.

When he left the bathroom it became clear to him that Master Splinter had noticed this, too. "Michelangelo," he said in his stern Ninja Master voice, "You have been increasingly distracted lately. May I ask what is diverting your focus?"

His brain froze, as it often did whenever Master Splinter asked him a question that was a lead-in into either a lecture or some form of punishment. It offered unhelpful one-liners, like: "You can _ask_, but I don't think I can tell you because it would endanger our agents in the field", "The important question of which is better, Pepsi or Coke," or even: "Well, it's obviously all Raph's fault."

"Uh," he sputtered out intelligently, "I don't know."

Fortunately this was a token response for him, and didn't sound nearly as strange or incriminating as: "Nothing! Nothing is distracting me! I am perfectly focused, alert, and not looking at my brother in any strange way! AHAHAHAHA! I leave now!" That would have been devastating, and he would have had to go in hiding for three years in the dankest bowels of…probably Chicago. As it was, he plastered on his plastic smile of 'I know I'm in trouble', because that was the easiest expression to go for and it could just mean that he fiddled around with someone's stuff again.

Master Splinter gave him a look that could probably burn holes through stone.

Michelangelo knew this technique well. Master Splinter was going to stand there with his rock-melting gaze, silent and patient and appearing quite prepared to simply sit there for hours waiting for him to get on with the rest of his explanation. This usually made them buckle after no more than two minutes of what was essentially The Staring Match of Doom.

But he would not buckle. He would not fold. He was unmovable and implacable in his determination not to talk.

"I am firm and resolved," he said with a depth of maturity never seen before in him, "And I will not stand for this craziness, nor will I stand for any more of these ninja mind games! I have replied to your question and I will hear no more on the matter! Now, if you'll excuse me, I must find the cure for cancer and stop world hunger!"

This was how the situation played out in his ample imagination. In real life, he stood there, sweating under his master's iron gaze until a row of unintelligible words flowed out. They went something along the lines of: "Mfwuh gurble mazoo."

"I am sorry, Michelangelo, but I'm afraid I didn't hear you."

The laser eyes stared deeply into his soul. Michelangelo rummaged around for a suitable explanation to present itself, hopefully one that didn't make him out to be a complete moron or a brother-lusting fanatic. Usually, he lost focus because of some new video game release that had taken over his free time, which he never really admitted to his father anyway. If he could just look sheepishly hangdog enough, maybe Master Splinter could actually buy that. It was worth a shot, it was believable, and it was much better than the alternative of hanging there in anguish until he might be persuaded to reveal something that he honestly didn't know the reaction to.

"Well," he said under his breath, "I'm, uh…there's…there is that new game I've been wanting to play." He said this with the right amount of reluctance, and since he was nervous and terrified enough on his own, he didn't even need to add that in. It worked perfectly, which was a little bit insulting, actually. Did they really think he could get so fixated on the new Final Fantasy or Battle Ravage that it could drive him to meditation and cold showers? But then again, it was best not to look the gift Master Splinter in the mouth. Better a long and mind-numbing lecture on the virtues of concentration and focus than…whatever result that he'd find if he admitted that Leonardo's physique was really starting to affect him in ways that bothered him in the middle of the night.

In the end, Splinter revoked his Playstation and other such game system privileges for a week, and consigned him to extra training bouts with Leonardo. He wanted to scream. In fact, he did scream, because it was a fitting response even if he wasn't plagued with craziness, and hoped that Master Splinter didn't notice the extra edge of panic in his voice when he did so.

He didn't. He gave him a look that condemned melodrama and went, ironically, to watch Dawson's Creek.

Leonardo just laughed and slung an arm around his shoulder. The gesture made Michelangelo freeze in complete disorientation, as if that touch just flung him out of reality and into some strange pocket universe. He stood very still, as if the slightest move would cause some strange shift in the atmosphere.

"Hey, don't worry, Mikey. I'll go easy on you," Leonardo said, obviously joking because he never let up on people. The big jerk.

He smiled unconvincingly and tried not to worry about that whole skin contact thing. "You think going easy means you'll only break _half_ my bones. I'm going to die! I just know it!" he went on dramatically, "Excuse me, I'm totally gonna have to buy an insurance plan for this."

Leonardo grinned. "Or you could just get moving," he said, sounding full of ruthless anticipation, "Practice starts in five minutes."

"Yes, dark master," Michelangelo groaned, "I'll get the Iron Lady ready." When Leonardo took his arm off of his shoulders, he still felt its weight as he turned to go warm up.

It wasn't too bad, all things considered. When they sparred, he let himself open for kicks he normally would have blocked, moved just a second too slowly so the blows would connect, just to get the jolt of pain to clear his mind. It was more of a self-punishment than he let himself admit. Not that he didn't fight back twice as hard: he launched offensive strikes made of a flurry of blows, ducked and dodged and strained his agility to keep from getting too close. Too close was close enough for a headlock or tackle, within arm's reach of his brother was No Man's Land. He probably looked like he was fighting off a wild animal: something with a roaring maw of teeth and wild, angry eyes, not a perfectly disciplined fellow ninja with no weapons.

The fights lasted longer than they used to, with him dancing just out of range and launching the obligatory assault, and Leo drawing him in to force him into combat. Eventually, he accepted defeat when he thought enough time had passed that the Slave Driver would let him surrender.

Leonardo gave him a strange look, which he pretended not to notice, when they were done.

He then paused and looked like he wanted to say something, but Michelangelo shoved his way into the silence with a demand for take-out after the misery he'd been made to go through, and this seemed to reassure his older brother enough that he didn't say whatever he'd been thinking. In fact, Michelangelo made a point to be obscenely boisterous, from ordering Chinese with a horrible Mexican accent to getting into an insult match with Raphael.

Later, though, he took dinner to his room and ate in the quiet, listening to the muffled noises of his brothers talking outside. He felt very tired, which was strange. It wasn't like he'd done anything out of the ordinary.

* * *

The brief confrontation with Master Splinter had led him to a realization that hadn't quite hit him up to that point. It wasn't quite an epiphany, because epiphanies struck him as things that were really deep and hardcore and world-changing, like: 'Oh my god! The key to my evil arch nemesis' revival was standing before me all along, in this canister!' or even 'E equals MC squared!' No, this one was totally and blaringly obvious. It was just hard to see its entirety because it was so enormous. 

No matter what, he couldn't tell _anyone_.

He'd thought of it before, obviously. Thought about keeping it all an embarrassing secret, like wetting the bed or sleeping with a nightlight. (Which he still had to do, because he couldn't sleep without the lamplight keeping the shadows from his bed.) But that had been more of a vaguer, instinctual desire. Actually having a situation come up where the whole mess could slip out in front of someone had just ignited the candle of recognition in his head. Suddenly, he had horrible thoughts of what could happen if he'd told anyone, from Master Splinter on down to even Donatello. Their reactions in his head ranged from shock and disgust to outright anger, in the most blown-up and trainwreck-syndrome way possible.

There was no way, he thought, this could ever be taken lightly, or even treated like, say, Leo's fear of heights. No matter how hard he tried to wrap his mind around just coming to anyone with the problem, it always came up as an inevitable disaster. Michelangelo was fairly sure that the homosexual aspect, by itself, would be fine with everyone. After all, they didn't have room to judge. But piled on with the whole 'I want to have sex with the brother I've been raised alongside of for fifteen years?' One more layer of possible sickness to contemplate.

The mental scenario he was picturing included him going to Master Splinter or Donatello, (Not Raphael, because who in their right mind would spill heartfelt anything to him, and not Leonardo, not ever,) and standing there as this horrible spotlight focused on him. Like those little desk lamps they shone in people's eyes for a 'Good Cop/Bad Cop' routine, only there were no Good or Bad cops, only a very puzzled father/brother. Then, after a few torturous minutes with him standing there dumbly in the paralyzing glare, he'd tell them about his problem.

At this point, his mind desperately tried to insert some humor. Like cop cars screaming, steam pouring out of ears, dramatic screaming or even his confession prompting everyone in the room to keel over and die of an immediate heart attack. Something, anything to dramatize it, to make it larger than life. Make it _funny_.

The problem seemed to be that the situation just held no humor, so even attempts to force it in just made it even worse. There wasn't any drama in his imagination, but then again, there wasn't anything there. His mind just refused to conjure an image, a definite image of what would happen next. There was just this mingled, vague cloud of fears: being held at arm's length, being sent away, Master Splinter somehow being Disappointed. And then, if he told Donnie, what if he just didn't know what to do, either?

He felt, like some horrible but definite premonition, that if his brothers knew, none of them would ever talk to him or look at him the same way again, and he didn't want that in a way that went bone-deep. It was a visceral rejection of even the concept. There was no way he could talk about this, no way to get help from the others. The simple and stupid epiphany of 1+1 equals 2. Duh.

The stress headache was kicking in. He'd never had one before six weeks ago. Five weeks ago they were a hazy possibility. Now, he kept aspirin alongside of his Tootsie Rolls in his homemade hollow comic stack, and had to dry swallow because Master Splinter kept an eye on what food he brought to his room after an incident with an ant colony and the Dr Pepper spill of '99.

He used to hate the taste of any medicine, liquid, pills, tea or the weird herbs Master Splinter managed to dig up. Aspirin stuck to his tongue and choked him, but he didn't really mind. It felt right, kind of, for it to taste bitter.


	2. might as well be on mars

**Growing Pains and Orange Bitters**

Chapter Two: _might as well be on mars_

By: Serendipity

* * *

**Standard Disclaimer**: If I owned the Ninja Turtles, the series would allow blood and the occasional vulgarity. Also, Michelangelo would get a lot more development, and April would get a better shirt. As it is, I have only my laptop to console me. 

**Author's Notes**: Unimportant note to be brought up here: I know that the turtles don't have doors in the series. They have doors in my fanfic, because what else would they slam, I ask you? You can't slam the air! Doors are absolutely necessary for the proper amount of teenage angst. So, somewhere along the line, they all decided they wanted more privacy for various things, and Donnie added some nice doors to their rooms. He is thoughtful that way.

* * *

He didn't like to call it research. Research was such a scientific word. Not that Michelangelo had anything against the wonderful world of Science, and all the great stuff it had to offer him as a consumer. No science, to central heating, no video games, and no microwavable pizzas. All in all, it was pretty great stuff with some wonderful benefits, and if he could pester Donatello enough he had it in his mind to help create even more wonderful techno-things for their subterranean lifestyle. So there was no doubt that mathematics and quantum mechanics and all manner of scientific things were pretty cool. 

It just didn't seem to meld at all with his usual modus operandi, but there was nothing else to call it. Information gathering was too search engine, data-collecting skipped past scientific and went straight to robotic sci-fi, and 'surfing the bookshelf' sounded too forced. He was _researching_, and that was all there was to it.

He felt that if maybe he could just find out what was behind all the post-puberty sexual weirdness, he could deal with it somehow. With that in mind, he'd turned to the greatest resource humankind had to offer: the amazing and expansive internet. Rife with knowledge about the subject matter to the point of notoriety, it was sure to give him at least some clue about how to deal with this. Also, something told him Dear Abby wouldn't fell up to replying to a letter that went like:

_Dear Abby,_

_I am a teenage__, mutant__ t__urtle hanging out in the sewers. I'm also a ninja,__ but that's not important right now. See, what's important is that lately I've been going through the whole hormone thing and it all kind of focused on my older brother.__ What would you do?_

"I don't know," he muttered at his keyboard, "See a shrink? Sorry, they're in short supply down here. Of course, we have some giant alligator dude that could pull off the psychology head-shrinking bit, but he's also totally unacceptable, because what I want is some nameless faceless doctor-type that I never have to see AGAIN."

And of course, what would probably happen was the letter getting ignored because, hey, giant turtles, yeah right. Look, Fred-The-Random-Sports-Editor, it's one of _those_ letters again. Toss it in the scrap bin and let's get back to our coffee, shall we? And if he, more realistically, left out the whole giant ninjitsu-practicing turtle bit, then what? It'd be a letter from some teenager with an incest problem, and something told him it wouldn't fit the tone of the column. Also, the response, if he'd get one, would be to see a shrink. Or get hopped up on enough medication it would take to make him socially acceptable, when who knew? Maybe he could just be plain out normally gay, and just fixating on Leo because he was a GIANT TURTLE, and there weren't any others except for them? No, advice columnists wouldn't work.

So, he'd filled up the screen on his personal laptop with countless windows, (Yeah, he'd got one as a Christmas present from Don who probably had a vested interest in him getting a new computer: no more strange games getting downloaded on _his_,) that made up a a strange and eclectic collection of psychoanalytic theories of sexuality and also some explicit sites. Viewing of these sites led to the conclusion that he found women really, really hot, which made everything even the more fucking confusing. And the psychobabble just plain out hurt his head to think about in its pure and undiluted form. Freud and Jung were ramblers. Utter ramblers. They were like the drunk people you met on the street that would form huge, strange theories about anything from life to potato chips, with hundreds of vague references that turned out to be mostly personal.

The only difference he could see was that Freud and Jung had bigger and more confusing vocabularies and had better references. He looked up Freud's theories for dummies and was frightened away by the Oedipus theory after maybe an hour of trying to reconstruct it so that it actually fit with his situation. After a while he decided that it totally didn't count at all because Leonardo wasn't his mother, and he wasn't feeling any specific aggression toward his brothers or father for just being there and being similarly loved by him.

The theories of Freud went the way of bodice-rippers, into the rubbish bin.

Most of the science websites he went on didn't make sense to him, either. He didn't like reading scientific stuff. It was like they had some great ideas, but bogged the whole concept down with a lot of unnecessarily gigantoid words, probably to make it sound more important. As it was, he thought he got the gist of the whole Westermarck Effect, but realized it probably didn't apply to him. Also, a brief look on incest pulled up hundreds of sites full of denouncements of its damaging effects later on in life and unsettling terms such as 'abuse' and 'dysfunctional'.

He'd found a website that described an incestuous relationship between siblings as one-sided abuse with one of the siblings forcing their un-met sexual needs on the other, and he spent a good time trying to tell himself that it totally wasn't the way he wanted to be, and that it would never happen that way. But then he kept thinking of the times during lessons that he just drifted away and fantasized about his brother, and wanted to throw up. All of this made him want to find a paper bag and keep it next to his computer at all times.

Of course, this new interest in unorthodox reading materials didn't go unnoticed by his brothers. It didn't do this because he'd been a moron and tossed the Freud For Dummies book in his trash can, and when his brothers came to collect him from his room for practice, it was sitting there in plain view. In hindsight, this was a bad thing.

"Hey, we're here to get you out of your spiritual retreat," Raphael said, using the term that his room had been stuck with after the Incense Fiasco, "Grab your stuff and prepare for a butt-whoopin'."

"Geez, Raph, I didn't know you were so eager," he replied, completely oblivious to Donatello, who'd been staring at his waste bin in disbelief.

"Freud for Dummies?" he asked, lifting it out of the trash to fully reveal its bright yellow evil. "Leaving aside the obvious and totally open subject of 'for dummies', what are you doing reading Freudian theories?"

"Why'd you leave the For Dummies subject slide? There's so much you can say! I could write a paper about it, and that's something, 'cause I'm not usually inspired to write," Raphael said, "Good to know you understand your reading level, Mikey."

"Maybe I should buy him Ninjitsu for Dummies," Leonardo said in an air of put-on thoughtfulness.

"Room Cleanin' for Dummies," Raphael suggested inventively.

"Incense Burning for Dummies?"

"No, he needs a whole new book series for all of this. It should be the 'For Complete Morons' series, because 'for dummies' is too high up on the totem pole of idiots for him."

"Do I even need to be here for this?" Michelangelo asked, grabbing the book back, "Do you guys have some kind of schedule I can just work around? Very funny. I give you a negative ten. All House points are subtracted right now." He tossed the book back in the garbage, and just for good measure, kicked the rubbish bin out of reach of any further prying hands.

"So, what is up with the book on Freud?" asked Donatello, still pursuing the subject. "That's kind of, uh, weird for you."

"Hey, I'll have you know that Freud was…" Michelangelo trailed off, the explanation perfectly clear in his mind: _An influential man in his field, who was pivotal to the current theories of psychology as we know it_, "A very strange man," he finished lamely, still struck by the horror of the book. "I mean he was really…" _a__n intelligent and groundbreaking theorist_, "Strange."

His brothers gave him a collective stare that communicated quite clearly that they thought he was nuts. Maybe even as nuts as Freud.

"Look, I found a big box of used books and that was in it, okay?" he said, exasperated.

"Well, it's just that you've been staying holed up in your room an awful lot lately," Leonardo said, arms folded and looking like he was ready to Get Down To The Bottom of Michelangelo's newfound reclusive lifestyle. This was a horrible thing for obvious reasons.

"Not that we're complainin' or nothing, the silence is refreshing," Raphael decided to add. Donatello raised an eyeridge at him in a silencing gesture, but Leonardo was apparently finished.

"It's WoW," Michelangelo admitted as if confessing that he'd committed a great sin, "It's consumed all my free time. It's sucked out my soul. My Tauren warrior is almost up to level sixty, and I need to buy some new armor. World of Warcraft is an all-encompassing obsession, people. I'm chained to my computer daily. It's awful. I can't sleep, eat, or even breathe. All I ask is to be left with my gaming mission. See?" he pointed to the screen of his laptop, where his character shifted around idly as it waited to be played. He'd closed out all other windows when he'd heard his brothers coming.

Not for the first time, he thanked god for Donny installing those doors in everyone's rooms. Sweet, sweet privacy. Hard to obtain in a house full of ninjas.

Leonardo sighed. It was a very older brother-type sigh, the kind used to express immeasurable amounts of tried patience. Michelangelo was struck by how much he loved how every one of those expressions were like an open book…and then he spun around and grabbed his nunchucks before his own expression betrayed him.

"I got it, I got it, practice is a' waiting," he said with a grin, and followed his brothers out the door.

* * *

He'd looked up how things were with turtles, too. He didn't think any of it applied: not the mating season, because it started in late summer and now it was early fall, and anyway the turtles were supposed to mate when they came out of hibernation, and of course he and his brothers never hibernated. And there weren't any female turtles to lust over, but then again, they were supposed to have some human in them. Humans were always 'in season'. Even their bodies weren't the same. Maybe that was part of why it was all so confusing and why he started out this way. He wasn't one thing or the other. Something was bound to go wrong. 

Practice got better, but not because anything went away. In fact, it wasn't really 'better' so much as, well, more stable somehow. The feelings weren't new anymore; he came up with ways to circumvent them. And when there weren't any ways, he just bore with the embarrassing physical reactions and the blushing and the lack of thought control. Nothing got better, nothing let up, the problem just had a sort of sameness to it now. It was a little like training with weights: at first it was unbearable, and you moved so slowly and clumsily, but after a while, the weights felt normal. He didn't want this feeling to be 'normal'. It wasn't 'normal'.

He decided that the worst part was having no one to talk to. In all those old movies, they always had some friend or family member or even wise old dude to confide in and clandestinely pour out all their woes to. Now, he was distinctly lacking in that department, the sewer wasn't exactly crawling with people, and the ones that were down there were so out of the picture they were in another art gallery. This left him at a loss for confidantes, and he was completely unused to being quiet. That just wasn't how he coped with things, he liked people, and he liked conversation and talking things out and getting people to help him sort out his thoughts by proxy. All of this…sickness felt like it was pressing in on him like steam in a pressure cooker.

This was how he found himself in April's living room, feeling extremely out of place and strangely like he should be reclining on a fainting couch, dictating the story of his life.

April handed him a soda and he took it clumsily; he didn't feel thirsty at all. Michelangelo didn't even pop the top up to drink it, just cradled the can in his hands and felt the cold of it, the slick, icy condensation.

"Sooo…" April said, prompting him to talk like a normal person, "We've been sitting here for the past ten minutes, and so far, you've just been admiring my new curtains. Not that I'm not pleased with the fact you noticed or anything, I quite like those curtains. I got 'em for five dollars at Wal-Mart, and that was a bargain. But something tells me you didn't come in here to comment about my choice in indoor decoration."

Michelangelo seriously considered telling her that, as matter of fact, he had, and that he had a wonderful idea for redecoration centering entirely on those brand new curtains. Then, he would flee into the dark recesses of the sewer, never to be seen again. But he reminded himself that he was going stir crazy down in the sewers and that he didn't want stir crazy to be replaced by ordinary, run-of-the-mill crazy.

"Well, uh," he started, wondering where the hell to go with this that wouldn't sound remotely suspicious, "There's, see, I was watching MTV." Yes, MTV. That was a perfectly normal channel to watch, and he could discuss the hot chicks at length. "And I was wondering about stuff like, what happens with the hormone thing. I mean, like when you get a crush."

Crush was a stupid word. Whoever invented the word crush should have been condemned to death on a far-off, frozen asteroid belt, surrounded by gigantic snow weasels that spoke with Valley Girl accents. It was just…girly. And stupid. And nothing _at all_ like what he was feeling, because crush sounded light and silly while the strange attraction he had for Leonardo was heavy, thick, and painfully serious. Then again, 'crushed' was an accurate description of his mental state. He felt crushed all the time.

April had sort of an arrested look, so he continued babbling stupidly, "Yeah, I know, you probably think I should talk to my family about this. Let me tell you why that is a horrible idea. Numero uno: if I tell my brothers, they will never let me hear the end of it, for this is our brotherly pact. It sucks, but that's life in the big city. And Master Splinter? He's like, I dunno, a plastic Buddha. I can't talk about, you know…hot supermodels with him. He is my all-knowing teacher of ninjitsu. And my mind would be scarred forever."

She was smiling. He took this as a good sign.

"So, I was watching this beach…something show. Lots of girls in bathing suits. I _like_ bathing suits," he added convincingly, because he did. He liked watching girls on TV dressed in bikinis or one-pieces, surfing or splashing around in the ocean water, hair darkened by the water and clinging to their face, and their bathing suits clinging even closer with the ocean crashing down around them. It just so happened that he liked Leo more, and he was dead certain that the same appeal wouldn't apply. For one thing, the bikini would just look retarded on a giant turtle.

"And as I was watching these supermodel girls in bathing suits," Michelangelo continued, trying not to be extremely obvious and put the emphasis in 'girls', "I, uh, noticed that I liked one better than the others, which is obvious favoritism, but I don't think the others would care, I mean, given the circumstances…and all…yes."

"You know, if you want to talk about hot girls to someone who's not in your family, why didn't you go find Casey?" April asked, "Not that I don't want to help you, but you'd probably be more comfortable talking about it to him. He and Raphael probably talk about the same subject when they have their macho guy-bonding sessions."

"Hey, I am always up for a good macho guy-bonding session," Michelangelo said, "Especially if there's cheesy nachos. And pizza. But for some reason they think I trashed the last one, so I am officially booted out of their campfire group thing, whatever you want to call it. They didn't like my dancing. This is fine, because they have no rhythm in their souls."

Actually, Casey hadn't even occurred to him as a possibility, probably because he was like some kind of branch or appendage of Raphael's personality, and Raph had already been thoroughly disqualified as a contestant in the 'Who Will Listen To Mikey's Deranged, Lovestruck Ramblings?' contest. Along with that, while he was okay in the friends department as long as you kept him away from fragile stuff and furniture when he was going into one of his crazy rages, he didn't strike him as the good listener type. Or the conversationalist type. Or really any type of person to have this sort of mumbling, stupid conversation with.

"Anyway, he's practically_ like _another brother," he continued, "And so I will never hear the end of it. And he might corrupt me," he added in a prissy tone, making April laugh. "So here I am to bother you with my crush talk. Just don't pop in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood or anything."

"Hey, just for that, no pint of Haagen Daas for you," she threatened jokingly. "And I have Rocky Road flavor. You're just going to have to suffer."

"Oh man, April, that is so not cool," he groaned theatrically, relieved that the conversation had turned away from other possible confidantes, "You can beat me, lock me up, skin me alive, and make me listen to Raph's off-key singing. But you cannot, I repeat, can NOT withhold junk food from me. It's just inhumane. It's morally wrong. It's against the Geneva Convention or something. I apologize for ever insulting your taste in movies, just please don't take the precious away from me!"

April eventually relinquished control of the ice cream, which was a relaxing influence on his crazed psyche. Feeling a little less like a tightly-wound spring, he began listing the virtues of the 'supermodel' to her at length, trying to keep to safe body parts, like eyes…and hands. Of course, hands on humans and hands on turtles were drastically different, so he kept it vague.

At one point, his brain fled to the mystical realm of Moronville and he started describing his crush's muscular shoulders to her.

"Muscular shoulders?" she asked, giving him a strange look.

"Uh…yes. They're very attractive," he said, cursing his lack of tongue control, "I really like women who, y'know, work out and stuff. This is the twenty-first century, right? I mean, I don't do sexist stuff like look only at Little Bo Peep women, mainly because the skirts freak me out. I just happen to like muscles and athletic stuff, okay? I think they're very… hot. Why wouldn't I? I'm a ninja!"

"Okay, I get it, I'm sorry," April waved her hands apologetically, looking like she was shooing away an errant moth or something. "Please continue."

He tried to move on to normal things, like legs, but he kept tripping himself up and talking about how the cords of muscle would tighten before the apocryphal supermodel leapt at people, which he frantically covered up by saying that she was also an action movie star, like Angelina Jolie. This seemed to go over well until he added that he also enjoyed watching her fight and went over every detail of the moves she went through. He kept on discussing muscle tone, and strength, and on occasion would mention that he really wanted someone who could belch the ABCs better than he could and wouldn't mind upside-down video gaming and who agreed that Coca Cola was much better than Pepsi, despite Raphael the heathen's convictions. Also, for choice, he appreciated strong, take-charge personalities.

"Are we still talking about a supermodel?" she asked skeptically.

Michelangelo felt the butterfly of panic flutter. "Yeah. A very butch one."

"I don't know of any butch supermodels."

"She's, uh, not really in a swimsuit competition. I lied," he said quickly, re-tailoring his approach, "She's in a magazine for women's wrestling and I fell in love with her rippling biceps and the way she filled out her spandex bodysuit."

April looked frankly disturbed.

"It's not all muscles and whoopass with her, y'know! Don't question my love! It's real and deep!"

"I'm going to have nightmares for weeks," April said, hovering on the frail line between joking and needing to go vomit in the toilet.

"You just don't appreciate the allure of wrestlers," Michelangelo said sadly, "It's okay. It's a dying art. Besides, she's very pretty." _Yes, in a green sort of way. Who are you trying to kid with this?_

"Pretty," April said with a nod, forcing a note of conviction in her voice.

"Right. Um, well, she has nice eyes," he continued, "I just said that, but I have to keep repeating. Yeah. They're this very nice…brown color. I like brown eyes. They're like, y'know, chocolate or something."

He knew that comparison was wrong the instant it came out of his mouth. Not only was it wrong, but it was just _bad_. It was horribly clichéd and what the heck was wrong with him, comparing people to food? This was something he used to make fun of on the rare and horrible occasion he ran across it on TV or in books. His eyes weren't anywhere near chocolate anyway, because that implied gooey, melty, puppy-dog eyes to his mind. Leonardo's expressions were never that soft. Even his smiles were reserved, even if they didn't have the sharp edges Raph's did.

"Not really like chocolate," he amended. "Just, like…they're very thoughtful. Not thoughtful as in taking care of people, but that happens a lot, too. It's more, like, not distant, but like they're looking at you from a long ways up. Not far away, and not stuck-up or anything, he's never been stuck-up, but just…like he's on a higher level."

"Sounds like you're idolizing too much."

"I don't idolize him," he said without much force, because he didn't know at that point if that was true or not. "Not really, anyway. I mean, it's more like he's kind of hard to talk to sometimes."

"_Him_?" April said in an arch, amused tone.

Michelangelo realized that his cunning plain had been foiled by his own inability to keep his mouth shut. "Or her. It's uh, hard to tell with those testosterone pills, you know."

April looked like she had seized upon an important piece to an enormously complicated puzzle. "Oh, you're _gay_," she said in tones of great realization, "Well, that explains everything."

"I'm not gay!" he said, biting off the natural addition of 'or an incestuous turtle in denial, either', and allowed the second part of her statement to sink in. "And hey, everything? Every detail about me is completely explained away by the possibility that I might be gay, not that I am? The nunchucks, the comic books, the love for pizza with jellybeans on it? All because of a certain sexual preference? Everything?"

"Oh, don't be melodramatic," April brushed away his protests with the professionalism of a natural armchair therapist, "I just meant the attraction to burly, muscular types."

"He's not 'burly'," Michelangelo protested, then slapped a hand over his face as he realized he let 'he' slip a second time. "She, I mean."

"Michelangelo, it's perfectly fine to be homosexual," April began, "A lot of my close friends happen to be homosexual, including a brilliant physicist who cross-dresses in his spare time and goes club-hopping. His name is Mildred, and I respect him as a fellow scientist, as well as fully believe that his sexual preference is completely acceptable and of no concern to me."

"That's nice of you," Michelangelo tried to insert.

"It's fine to be gay, and you shouldn't be afraid of people judging you for it!"

"I'm a giant, mutant turtle. I don't think that'll be the first thing on their mind," he tried, but clearly he'd sparked off one of April's pet peeves and, unless he acted quickly, would be subjected to an hour-long tirade, after which she'd offer him some juice and cookies. He wanted to skip straight to the cookies, especially since the whole topic of sexuality was now a bad subject for him.

"April, you're right," he said, raising his voice in desperation, "You're absolutely right, I am gay, and I have a really bad crush on, on, on," he searched frantically through his mind for the name of a male actor, but kept on coming up with Hugo Weaving for some reason. Finally he latched on to a name. "Brad Pitt," he nearly shouted, "Yes! Dude! I watch all of his movies!"

"There, you see? That wasn't so hard," April said with satisfaction borne of ignorance.

"I feel better already," Michelangelo replied, looking as cheerful as possible.

"Is this the reason why you didn't talk about it with your brothers?" she asked, her tone made more gentle with sympathy, "I know it's hard for people to come out to their families, but I think your brothers should be accepting of it. You are all very close, and it shouldn't change anything for you."

"Ahahaha," Michelangelo said, "I'm nervous." He _was_, he found, incredibly nervous. It might have been because he'd just made a fragment of a confession, a tiny chip off of the iceberg of personal terror that was his life lately, and he was afraid of making more. He wasn't nervous of telling his brothers, because the possibility was so remote it was senseless to think about or even try to grasp, and he wasn't nervous of them accidentally finding out. He was terrified, in a small, secret, intimate way. He'd been terrified in battle before, and it felt entirely different from the dizzy lightheaded panic he felt whenever it felt like someone got a little too close to the truth.

"Hey, there's no need to be nervous," April consoled.

Michelangelo kind of zoned out for the rest of it because of the intense feeling of stupidity he was suffering. He wasn't overtly lying to April…okay, so he was _totally_ and overtly lying to her, and she was trying to comfort him and walk him through what she apparently saw as a difficult Life Journey, and it all felt so fake and empty that he wanted to steal Raphael's shtick and go out to hit something. That in itself was a very strange inclination for him. Usually he just wanted to play video games or drown in comic books when he wasn't feeling good. But there was April, being so nice, and he was lying to her face and trying to get advice that wouldn't even matter, because he'd cheated to get it.

"…And that's all that there is to it," she concluded, bringing an end to what was undoubtedly a half-an-hour lecture.

"Okay, I'll be sure to do that," he said, not knowing what he was volunteering to do. He could always blame it on bad memory later.

"So," she said, giving him a mischievous smile, "Care to tell me about Brad Pitt?"

"He's got nice hair," he offered.

She raised an eyebrow at him.

"It's the square jaw, I think. It's like Superman," he added, "And he played Death. That is always very cool, even if he totally didn't act like it." He'd actually hated that movie. April, apparently, loved the film and squealed about it for a few minutes before he was allowed to continue to elaborate about his heartfelt desire for Brad Pitt. He was at a complete loss, because he'd already used up all his physical traits about the nonexistent wrestling supermodel babe, so he found himself turning to personality.

"Yeah, and he looks like the type who can take charge, and I like that kind of quality. I mean, I like, you know, the strong, sort of brooding types, it's a kind of look. Like Leo…nardo," Michelangelo said somewhat dreamily, and then bolted back to reality with a sharp bolt of panic, "DiCaprio. In, uh, that Titanic movie."

April frowned in confusion. "Did he brood in Titanic?"

"No, but…well, in Gangs of New York," Michelangelo said quickly, "Lots of brooding in there. Also violence. Wonderful, gratuitous violence."

"I never pegged you as a Leo fan," April said, not noticing Michelangelo's wince at the name, "Not to mention watching Gangs of New York. You'd think you get enough of that on a daily basis."

"I'm a glutton for punishment and gang violence," he said cheerfully.

April paused and looked thoughtful. "It's kind of strange about Leonardo DiCaprio, though, having the same name as your brother."

"Yes. Hahahaha!" Michelangelo laughed, and then decided with a panicked kind of logic that it was now time to leave.

At that point, someone, quite possibly sent by the angelic choir, knocked at the door. This person turned out to be Casey, who was distinctly not the angelic type, but Michelangelo would take his distractions no matter what form they took. This was Providence in pancake makeup. Now all he'd have to do was leave before they suggested some group activity.

"I, uh, have to go home now," he said, shooting up in his chair as if some unseen person had jabbed him with a pin, "I must water my ferns."

Oh, yes, that was totally subtle. He was the master of clever excuses.

April gave him an odd look, but Casey seemed impenetrable to excuses, painfully lame or not. He was Casey Jones, the human brick wall, and he would stand for no plant-watering when there were crazy Western movies to be viewed and popcorn to be consumed in massive quantities.

"I mean, this is Home on the Oakland Range!" Casey said, trying to display by means of excessive hand gestures how intensely amazing the movie was, "It's one of the best, man! It's got gunfights _in_ gunfights!"

"Also, it has excellent cinematography," April pointed out. Michelangelo and Casey looked at her for a moment, their expressions implying that she was insane, before she sighed. "Yes, all right. It's all about the showdowns."

"Damn skippy," Casey said fervently. "And these gun fights are completely friggin' awesome. They have people gunslingin' off the chandeliers. Dude, you seriously willing to miss out on that?"

Michelangelo was torn. But this was a delicate situation and required delicacy, and he also didn't put it past April to ask him about coming out of the closet in Casey's earshot. He had to be gone, like the wind or some other fast force of nature, before such a mortifying event could ever occur.

"Yeah, I really hate to, but see, I have to go. I'm supposed to help, uh, fund-raise."

This probably could have been replaced with a billion slightly more plausible reasons why he had to be gone right at that moment, and he realized it directly after the words left his mouth.

"And when I say that," he continued nervously, "I don't mean for the Girl Scouts, because that would be completely crazy and it would totally never happen. I know that! I meant for the, uh, Justice Force."

"You're fundraising for the Justice Force?" April repeated, looking floored by that statement. "What are they raising funds _for_?"

"For a retirement facility," Michelangelo said, lying through his teeth shamelessly, "It's for, uh, retired superheroes! They need money to pay for the shuffleboard lessons and the jigsaw puzzles, and they need me to make posters. So, yes, I need to go now. I would totally stay with you guys to watch your totally awesome film, but Justice calls me! With Crayola marker sets it calls me!"

"Okay," April said, drawing out the word to enunciate her profound skepticism.

"Hey, if you got plans, you got plans," Casey said jovially, slinging an arm around his shoulders.

Michelangelo flinched at the touch and pulled out of his grasp, still smiling to make a pretense of cheerfulness. He noticed Casey's puzzled look, but couldn't think of any way to explain himself. He just hurried to the door before he could make the situation any worse.

"See you 'round, guys," he said, pulling the door open, "I'll make sure to drop by later. Y'know, for tea and crumpets."

"Bye, Mikey," April said, and she looked like she was contemplating something as he pulled the door shut behind him. In hindsight, he probably should have been very worried about that.

* * *

April turned on Casey as soon as she assumed that Michelangelo was out of even a ninja's superhuman hearing range. "Casey. Casey, do you understand what just happened?" 

"Yeah, he just turned down watching one of the best cowboy movies available on the Eastern seaboard," Casey replied, popping the video into April's VHS, "You really oughta look into getting a DVD player, you know that?" he said as the video slid in.

April strolled over with purposeful, fluid steps and flicked off the TV. "Ignore the movie," she said impatiently, "The movie isn't the point. The movie has nothing to do with it."

"Is this Everyone Bash On Western Movies Day, babe?" Casey asked, looking stricken, "Only I'm sure you requested…"

"Okay, let me rephrase," April said, pacing over to the couch and sitting down.

She had spent the past minute putting together the pieces of the conundrum that Michelangelo had presented, and was fairly sure that she'd reached the correct hypothesis: Michelangelo had not only just come out of the closet, but he was quite obviously dealing with an unrequited crush on Casey Jones. This explained how unwilling he was to talk to her about who exactly the object of his affections was, because she was currently dating him. That sort of thing would make anyone a little awkward, and Michelangelo wasn't usually the awkward type. Also, since he was just coming out, he was naturally very confused.

This explained so many things! His desire for a belching buddy and his love of square jaws, and his talk about muscles and fighting. She'd finally realized it all when he'd been so eager to leave once Casey himself had showed up. April had wanted to be a reporter when she was younger, and she was pretty sure she'd have been a good one. She had, she told herself, the right instincts for going to the heart of the matter. Sure, sometimes they were completely wrong, but most of the time she was pretty much on the right track.

"Casey, you should probably sit down for this," she told him. He was already kneeling on the floor in front of the TV, so he just gave her a puzzled look as he waited patiently for her new burst of insight.

April did not disappoint. "You should know that Michelangelo and I just had a very long conversation about sexuality, and he came out to me. Along with this, I'm sure that he has a crush on you."

Casey dropped from kneeling to sitting flat on his bottom in less than five seconds, banging his arm against the VCR and causing the tape to eject with an angry mechanical sound.

"_Very_ sure," April concluded mercilessly.

"But," Casey stuttered, his mouth gaping open, "But...he…well, he's, y'know…"

"A giant turtle? Yeah, I thought that was kind of obvious by looking at him, but if you're just figuring that one out, maybe we should work on you, too." she said sarcastically. "Look, you should probably just talk to him about it. You can do that, right? Look, he's probably already very confused about it…"

"_He's_ confused? I'm stunned. Come on, I don't got any idea what to do, babe," Casey said, talking quickly out of nervous energy. "What am I supposed to say? Dude, I don't go for turtles?"

"You could probably not say that. Come to think of it, I should write you a script," April rolled her eyes, "Men. So wordy when talking about wrestling and football, so verbally constipated when it comes to talking about feelings."

"Hey," Casey said, "I talk about feelin's. When I'm feeling hungry, I'll say it! When someone pissed me off, I'll say it! This is just…a little different, okay?" He ran a hand roughly through his hair, causing some of it to stand on end, and stood up.

April wondered, briefly, if he would go into one of those destructive rampages that hit whenever a particularly trying emotion hit him, but it seemed that her furniture was safe from his violent urges. Casey just started pacing the length of the room like a caged wolf; a hand over his forehead to brace him from the craziness, announcing at intervals that he had no freakin' clue what to do.

"I have," he said for the fifteenth time that hour, "No _clue_ what to do." Then he cursed, "This is like I just stepped into the set of Oprah. I can't deal with this. I was just setting out to watch a movie, thought it'd be a normal Friday night, and then one of my mutant turtle pals decides he's got a closeted crush on me. What the hell is wrong with my life?"

"I think it started with the mask-wearing thing," April decided, showing no sympathy whatsoever. "Look, I'm sorry, but I think it would help a lot if you were just to talk it over with him. You know, give him some closure. Otherwise he'll just worry about it for too long, and I don't think he'd ever ask you about it directly."

"Yeah, sure," Casey groaned, "I'll go hang out with him later tonight. 'M supposed to meet Raph to talk about some bike thing, anyway. I could just find Mike and go buy, I dunno, groceries or something with him. But this is nuts."

"Good," April said, pleased with her stunning ability to solve problems and secure in her belief that the problem with Michelangelo would be over soon."Now let me go make some popcorn so we can watch this movie of yours."

* * *

The rooftop was lined with black tar roofing tile, still warm after a day of absorbing the sun's heat. He wasn't in the residential section, but he could tell that there should be rooms directly below his feet: there were towels stretched out on the tar like it was a stretch of sandy beach, and clothesline was tied from the small shed to a pole that jutted up from the roof's surface. He hadn't bothered to look and see what building he was on, but he guessed it was a store of some kind with the upper floor renovated for living in, much like April's store. 

He stepped quietly toward a tricycle, onto which was tied a rolled-up sheet of construction paper in eye-searing neon yellow. While he wasn't exactly doing fundraising for the Justice Force, he _was_ collecting something for them. Even if it was something like a glorified mailman job.

Sometimes kids would leave notes for the superheroes out on the rooftops, a lot like kids left notes out for Santa. It was like a big-city version of writing letters to the President for them, only probably much cooler, since the President most definitely didn't have laser vision or the ability to fly. Most of the letters were lost, to rain or wind, or to people just picking them up and tossing them in the trash. Maybe the superheroes didn't check for them or they did, depending on which one the kids were writing to. Michelangelo knew that Silver Sentry looked out for them when he could.

There was a definite pattern as to where the kids would leave them: usually under something secure, using a rock or a heavy toy as a paperweight, and as high up as possible. They'd tie ribbons to them sometimes, or paint them bright colors, or make them noticeable in any way they could. One of the more ingenious ones stuck a superhero logo in black paper on a flashlight and cast it out onto the wall. Of course, it ran out of batteries after a while, but that was a pretty nifty idea, and he wholeheartedly approved.

The problem with this system was that superheroes generally didn't have time to stop and smell the flowers, to say nothing of collecting fan-mail from kids. Since none of the brilliant minds down in superhero headquarters had managed to get together a mailing address yet, and no superhero worth his cape would give out his own for such a purpose, only a good five percent of the letters were found, and most of them weren't even found by the superhero they were addressed to. (That wasn't even mentioning the occasional villain mail, which was indeed a puzzle. There was a small pile gradually piling up back at their crazy super-fortress.)

This was where he came in. Being honest with himself, he knew the Turtle Titan didn't punch in half as many work hours as the others, seeing that his main job was, well, being a ninja turtle and occasionally being besieged by the hosts of evil put forth by the Shredder. Turtle Titan was more of an on the side thing, although he did do more superheroing than he suspected even his brothers knew. Master Splinter knew, though. He'd come in one night when he knew everyone should have been enjoying their few hours of sleep in the weird sleeping schedule they had, and Master Splinter had been sitting on the couch, awaiting his arrival. He'd told him that he was very proud of his good-intentioned decide to fight evil, and would not punish him for such acts, but he would, and this was said with a steely glint in his eye that meant Serious Business was about to go down, order him to halt any superhero activity if his severely diminished sleep time made him slower during training and cut into his abilities as a ninja. Then he'd told him to make sure to brush his teeth before he went to bed and went to his room, leaving him standing in their living room area in befuddlement.

So he'd shifted his schedule around some, taking a nap during free time, when he was usually doing something like organizing his comics or pretending to clean his room, and continued to go on the occasional superhero team-up, deciding that it was worth the sacrifice. Lately, of course, he hadn't been able to take naps, and sleep, when it came, was often full of strange, feverish dreams that made him wake up at the crack of dawn, sweating, and unable to let himself go back to sleep. This gave him three o' clock AM free time, as well as a deteriorating sense of humor. He kept on telling the same jokes or messed up the punch-lines, messed up the order of the joke, and even told jokes that had nothing to do with whatever situation he told them in. Just the other day he'd used up his knock-knock joke quota. This was a serious problem for him.

In any case, since he more or less had the free time and often found himself on the rooftops of the city anyway, he'd taken it upon himself to play the role of Hermes and collect as many of those letters he could. He found them once in a while when he was training with the others, or when they were out on a mission, or even when he was just on a food run. When he encountered one, he'd fold it and tuck it in his belt for safe-keeping, or stash it elsewhere, keeping it a secret.

Michelangelo didn't know exactly why he didn't tell anyone about the mail, but he'd kept it away from everyone, delivering the mail he found in secret. Maybe because it was because none of them really could understand the whole superhero thing, or at least didn't appreciate the fact that he also was one. It seemed to be kind of embarrassing for them to see him in the outfit, and he didn't want that same sense of embarrassment, the same sort of sarcastic comments to be passed over to this. This was something, well, special. He felt important in a small way, making sure the kids could get their thoughts to their heroes. It was that same kind of feeling he had delivering toys to those orphans on Christmas.

Another reason to keep it secret was that he liked it that way. He'd liked having something that his brothers knew nothing about, something that belonged only to him. Of course, that was before the other secret came along and he started to get desperate for someone, anyone, to spill it to. This, of course, put something of a damper on his enjoyment for other kinds of secrets.

The letter was a little faded, which meant it had probably been up on the roof for a couple of days. Good thing it hadn't rained that week, or this letter would be completely toast. He worked on the colored pipe-cleaners attaching it to the handlebars and finally unfolded it.

Handwriting in dyslexic crayon scribbles, marking the sender as at least five. On the bottom of the paper there was a meticulously, (for a kid), drawn picture of what looked like a strange, pointy frog creature with huge, white, feathered wings. Yup. Definitely for Raptarr. Now, good luck to him actually figuring out what the hieroglyphic handwriting actually said. Michelangelo was usually good at decoding the ancient and venerable art that was kid language, but sometimes even he, the great linguistic master, had to admit himself stumped. Fortunately his fans, when he could find them, had not yet reached that level. He'd decided this meant he was pulling in a more intelligent fanbase.

He folded the letter back up with a sigh and stashed it one of the inner pockets of his belt. Sometimes he'd write back funny little notes for the kids, scribbling a stylized little Turtle Titan face on the edge, but for some reason or another, he didn't feel like he could write something like that tonight. Still, he pulled out his handy Post-it note pad and scribbled out his usual message in pen: 'Your friendly neighborhood Turtle Titan mail service has forwarded your message! Congrats and salutations from your pals in the Justice Force!'

"Exclamation mark, exclamation mark, embellishment, embellishment, little swirly flower thingy, other signs of extreme excitement," he said aloud, sticking the Post-it to the trike's handlebars. "Thank you for using Mikey Airlines for all your mailing needs. Please look into our postage system, very cheap, very efficient; did I mention we have those stamps cherry-flavored?"

The tricycle, an inanimate object and therefore silent by nature, said nothing.

"Tough crowd," Michelangelo told it, "I bet you're just a bubbling livewire waiting to shine, yes? Hollywood would love to have you."

The tricycle obeyed natural laws and remained completely silent. It was clearly not a very good conversationalist, nor was it a closeted extrovert. Michelangelo realized that he would just have to accept this fact and move on. He tucked away his pen with a flourish and, feeling somewhat better for the random act of kindness, he traveled to a different rooftop by means of his amazing leaping skills.

His mind kept wandering, like some rambling drunk, back to the conversation with April. This was not a profitable place to return to, it was fruitless and he'd totally wasted her time, but he couldn't help but wonder if maybe he could take tiny baby steps towards at least being less horribly alone with his problems. And right there he thought he had it, maybe that was the worst of it for him. He hated being alone.

For a while he pondered telling them, or at least one of them, at least Donatello, about his being gay for an unnamed someone. Maybe if he could just let a tiny piece of the issue slip, say that he was gay but by NO means, DANGER WILL ROBINSON, mention any attraction towards Leo, maybe he could get…what? All the feel-good vibes from being supported by family without any actual support because, really, he still _wouldn't have told anyone_ the actual problem he needed help with? Oh, yes. That would be brilliant. Brilliant like dropping a plugged-in hairdryer into the bathtub.

The next five rooftops had nothing.

And it wasn't even as if that would solve anything. Heck, it might just cause even more problems, make them ask questions he wasn't comfortable answering. It was stupid, just plain stupid to think that there was some kind of clean fix to this, especially when he was going through it on his own. Stupid to think that just talking to people could fix it.

And _what_ was wrong with his family, not noticing what felt like the most obvious crush in the history of obvious crushes, not noticing the fifty thousand minutes he spent every morning just staring at Leo across the table after he'd just come from the showers and would just sit there, smelling like Irish Spring and eating his cereal, like it was another completely new and totally average day? Didn't notice that he couldn't so much as carry on a conversation with him anymore without making retarded comments about random topics, and couldn't compliment him on anything without sounding like a simpering moron?

It struck him as annoying that this whole issue was passing almost completely unobserved, aside from the occasional comments of 'you look tired, Mikey.' He knew this was insanely contradictory to the whole, paranoid, 'No one must know!' attitude he had, and that he should be proud of his ability to keep the wool over everyone's eyes, but there it was. Yet more proof that hormones were making him lose his grasp on sanity.

In a way, he kind of wanted Leonardo to notice.

A picture of Silver Sentry with a heart next to it, folded into a paper airplane in some tree. He pulled it out of the branches and stuck it absentmindedly next to the other note.

Meanwhile, April now thought that he liked Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. He could see where this led. This led to being covertly invited to scores of chick flick marathons. He cursed his inability to stay quiet about his problems.

Someone pealed laughter down at street level, and he kept sure to stay out of range of the street lights, too high up to be anything more than indistinct shadow. A glance down told him that a group of kids were just getting out of a taxi, laughing and crazy and probably high off adrenaline and loud music. They were three girls, one boy, dressed in typical club wear and laughing loudly at some private joke. The boy's arm was around a girl's waist and she swatted at him and then wrapped her arms around his neck, stumbling slightly in her heels. He added alcohol to one of the options under adrenaline and loud music.

As the taxi sped away and one of the girls fumbled with her keys, the girl with a stranglehold on the boy confessed loudly to the night sky that she was in total, desperate, heart-wrenching love with this Adam fellow, (Adam was presumably the boy she was clinging to like a barnacle,) and that she couldn't stand the thought of leaving him. Ever. At all. Never.

"Seriously," the sober, home-keeping one commented as they got their inebriated friend inside, "She's totally into you. Can't get you out of her mind, I swear it's like an obsession. She's so lucky."

Michelangelo laughed and the sound came out strangely, like it was choked off somewhere in the back of his throat. "Lucky, all right," he said, then turned to go home.

* * *

Raphael had this strange, sneaking suspicion that something was bothering Casey. He had made this hypothesis based on the solid evidence presented in front of him. 

Exhibit A: The fact that Casey hadn't so much looked at the strange leak in his motorcycle when Raphael pointed it out upon his arrival at the warehouse, when usually if someone informed him of a slight problem with his ride he would have rushed to inspect the damage, miniscule or not, with great dismay. As a matter of fact, Casey hadn't even looked at the new improvements Donny had made to the shell cycles. He'd rode in, looking like someone had smacked him over the head with a two-by-four, greeted the air above Raphael's head vaguely, and then began to unpack Exhibit B.

That brought him to the next item. Exhibit B: The six pack of beer that Casey had lugged with him. He hadn't been drunk when he'd arrived, because even Casey knew better than to drive while under the influence, and even if he hadn't known better, he'd damn well knew better than to do so right of Raphael or any of his brothers. Upon questioning, though, he'd just said he was thirsty. The guy was a lousy liar. Then again, almost everyone Raphael knew were lousy liars. This was some kind of a prerequisite.

"So…" he said, to the warehouse in general, "Anything you wanna tell me?"

"Nothin' to tell," Casey replied, waving his beer can around in the air to punctuate his words, "Nothing happened. It's been pretty boring. I watched a movie with April, came over here to hang with you and look at…what was I looking at?"

"The bikes, dude. The bikes," Raphael replied, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.

"Yeah, bikes. Nice new tires," Casey complimented before tackling another can. Apparently this was National Drunken Idiocy day and no one had sent out a memo to the sewer-dwellers. That seemed pretty frickin' rude, considering the circumstances.

Struggling with his patience Raphael continued for what felt like the hundredth time that evening. "Case, I told you. The tires aren't new. The headlights aren't new. In fact, we won't even start seeing the new stuff until I test this baby out on the road. The road that I will no longer be able to take because for some reason, you thought it'd be a swell idea to have Happy Hour in the warehouse. Now, are you gonna tell me what's wrong, or will I have to start getting' physical?"

"Oh _no_," Casey groaned, looking pale, "Not you too."

"What?" Raphael asked with honest puzzlement, "Someone else got there before me?" He thought that meant someone had roughed up Casey before he showed up, but the way his face paled, he doubted it was that. Casey just looked plain out pissed off after a fight, not spooked out of his wits.

"Oh my god," he was moaning, looking traumatized, "What's next? Leo? Don? Everyone at once?"

Raphael felt like they were trying to go about rehearsing for a scene in the movie while reading off of completely different scripts. He took a few minutes to puzzle through the problem and try to come up with some kind of reason for this reaction. "What the hell are you talking about?" he asked finally, more at home with plain, upfront demands, "What are Leo and Donnie gonna do to you? Did you join up with Mikey?"

"No, man! That's what I'm here for! 'Cause I _ain't_ joining up with Mikey! And don't look at me like that, I'm not about to go teaming up with you, either!"

"Case, I didn't think it was possible for anyone but Mikey to use words that I know the meaning to and then string them into a sentence that makes absolutely zero sense, but today you have proven me wrong! Congratulations! Now fer crissakes start making sense or I'm gonna kick you out until you do!" At that, he paused and checked to see if his own sentence had been coherent, realized it had, and felt relieved. He'd always known Mikey's moron speak was contagious.

Casey shook his head solemnly "No, no, April told me not tell you guys about nothing. 'S'why I'm here." He nodded as if that actually managed to make logical sense, and Raphael's already fine thread of self control started to strain.

"What, what, WHAT?" he shouted, "Are you TALKING about?"

"Look, I told you," Casey snapped, sounding testy, "April told me not to talk to you guys about Michelangelo comin' out and having a crush on me, so I'm over here…to talk to him about it or something. Also, I don't got no idea what to say, but it's gotta be something huge. And tactful. Dammit, she should've wrote me a script."

Raphael, meanwhile, had suffered the effect of having the universe implode in on him. "Mikey's what with the what now?" he finally managed to ask.

"Look, I didn't say all this stuff, apparently he went off and talked to April about it or something, and now she's dragging me in and it's totally over my head. Goddammit. Look, don't tell Mikey I know about it, okay? I think it's supposed to be some kinda surprise intuition thing. I'm gonna talk to him about it later, is that cool? I'm just kinda out of it right now. It's just weird."

"You sure he's, y'know, carryin' a torch for you?" Raphael asked, still stunned, "Couldn't be some _other_ Casey? Comic book character maybe?"

"Nah, they had some big Comin Out thing, I dunno. So now he's gay and he's decided he likes me, of all the people on the globe to pick out. However that shit works out. Look, I'm gonna jet. I need to take a walk."

"Hey, no big," Raphael replied, the beginnings of a horrible plan blooming in his head, "Catch up with you later. I got to, you know, take care of some things."

Casey staggered off into the night, and Raphael started composing his brilliant scheme. Yes, indeed, there would be mayhem of the sibling teasing variety. He still hadn't got Michelangelo back for the time when he'd plastered a kick me sticker to his shell and let him walk around with it for a day. He figured this whole crush on Casey deal was worth at least a week's worth of Mikey torture.

* * *


	3. with a little help from my friends

**Growing Pains and Orange Bitters**

**Chapter Three: **_with a little help from my friends_

By: Serendipity

**Standard Disclaimer**: Yup, the previous comment still stands. I own nothing belonging to the Ninja Turtles. Depressing, isn't it? I think I'm making the characters suffer for it, sadly.

**Author's Note**: To the general population reading this fanfiction, we have now reached the turning point. The threshold that divides humor and angst! The borderline! That means I really ought to go all out with it while I can, yes? I actually remember writing part of this chapter on vacation months and months ago, before the first chapter was even completed. Yup, lying on a hotel bed in Florida. The things we do when bored.

* * *

Michelangelo made his way into the Lair and became aware of a pressing, primal urge for a drink. He headed down the stairs, visions of soda cans dancing in his head, and looked around absentmindedly for one of his brothers. The place seemed awfully quiet, which usually meant that Master Splinter had done laid down the Law and ordered everyone into an hour or so of silence so that he could get in his daily dose of soul-cleansing meditation. This meant that they were probably playing a quiet card game or reading, or, in Leonardo's case, most likely off doing various, quiet ninja things.

Sure enough, he spotted them near the reading nook: someone had taken out the folding table and set it up, and they were all busily playing at something that looked, at a passing glance, to be Trivial Pursuit. Donatello had probably roped everyone into the game again. He was usually okay at it, tending to score a lot of points in pop culture knowledge, but it wasn't on his list of favorite pastimes, so he waved a greeting at them and intended to just pass them on by in favor of grabbing a soda.

Then Raphael looked up from the game board and grinned in a way that usually impended prankitude, "Hey, Mikey," he greeted jovially, "We're playing this new game we just made up. Wanna join in?"

All of a sudden he couldn't help but notice that the others were sort of giving him surreptitious looks as well. Sneaky looks, really, like they were anticipating something falling from the ceiling and landing on his head.

He actually flicked a glance upward to determine that no carefully-placed buckets would be emptying their contents onto his head. None showed themselves. He was surprisingly not reassured.

"Sure," he responded slowly, "Like, what kind of game? My brain's too fried for Trivial Pursuit, guys. I'm gonna get the pop culture references mixed up with history stuff, so it's best not to throw that at me right now."

Michelangelo pulled out the internal filing cabinet and flipped through anything he could have done to deserve a prank volley, and came up totally emptyhanded. Recently, he'd been burying himself too deep in the psych books to come up with any pranks, aside from the incident with a soda can a few weeks ago that had been blamed on him, but was totally not his fault. Could be fallout from that. Either that, or there had been a planetary alignment and all of his brothers had simultaneously decided to pull something.

"No, this one should be easy," Donatello said, selecting a few cards from the stack in front of him as he spoke, "It's just a word association game, or a word recognition game. I'll ask a question about a word, and someone will say the word that I'm referencing to. Either that, or I'll speak a sentence, leaving out a key word, and you can guess which word it is that I left out."

Donatello was saying this without the rising gleeful note that Raphael had, but that didn't mean anything as far as the situation being some variety of sibling trap was concerned, since Donatello was the Dastardly Ninja Pranker. His tricks, if rare, were completely unexpected and soared right out of left field like some horrible prank zeppelin. The evidence was still inconclusive.

Then again, he could be being completely and totally paranoid and seeing signs of mischief where there actually were none. This was not a good sign, because it was a step towards becoming a quivering lump of goo that saw conspiracies and secrets everywhere, and he was not in the market for yet another psychosis to add to his growing stack.

With this in mind, he sat down on the nearest folding chair with a shrug. "Alright, deal me in," he said cheerfully."Whose turn is it right now?"

"Mine to ask the questions," Raphael said, looking way too sinister for his own good, "And speakin' of which, here we go: Finish the lyrics for this famous song phrase: 'I feel pretty, and witty, and…"

Leonardo and Donatello looked extremely thoughtful at this obviously puzzling question, both of them staring into space with intense looks. Leonardo tapped a pencil against his chin in contemplation of the challenge set forth by this question. Meanwhile, Michelangelo began to believe that his paranoia may not have been completely unfounded.

"Hey, Mikey, you're good with the musical references, right?" Donatello asked as if he had absolutely no hidden intentions at all. As well he might not, after all, it was only the first question, "Do you know it?"

"Gay," he said tonelessly. "Pretty and witty and gay."

"Good job! Three points to you," and Raphael made a little note on the scoreboard in the middle of the table. 'Next question: word that means really, really hot, and on fire."

"Flaming?" asked Leonardo.

Michelangelo noted that the cards that they were playing with were Trivial Pursuit cards, and there was no way that the questions they were reading could have come from the cards in the middle of the table.

Donatello looked impressed, because he was obviously a shifty jerk who could school his facial expressions with ease. "Wow, good guess!"

"It just came to me," Leonardo said, looking almost entirely innocent. Except for the fact that he was straining too many facial muscles to hide the fact that he was trying not to grin.

Michelangelo decided that his sense of paranoia was not, in fact, paranoia, but an unshakable and solid knowledge of the way the world actually was, and he would no longer ignore the little klaxons in his head that informed him when something was about to go down.

The next fifteen minutes were spent in a strange mixture of agony and the mad and inexplicable desire to set fire to the folding table as his brothers went over every single word that could possibly imply homosexuality. Then, they delved into gay culture and started guessing the names of shows like Will and Grace and Queer Eye, and Michelangelo decided that he would make a convenient excuse to leave. He would tell them that he had to take care of a matter of extreme importance, such as finding cake mix or even, god help him, cleaning his room, and then he would take out of there like it was the middle of a freaking volcano. After that, he would go straight to April's apartment and inform her about the Mikey Protection Program and its basic tenets that had been set forth since the beginning of adolescence to aid him. Especially the First Law of Mikey Protections, which meant that private conversations were meant to be private or they could be used against him in the court of brotherly teasing.

"_What_," Donatello asked in the same way someone would ask the ancient Sphinx riddle, "Were most of the characters in the cast of Rent?"

Everyone looked at Michelangelo in anticipation.

"HIV positive?" he said in a flat tone.

Donatello sighed in disappointment of his guessing skills, which were clearly lacking. "Nope, but that was a good guess. Raph, do you know the answer?"

"Gee, Don, I dunno. The question's hard."

"Oh my god! Dudes, I get it!" Michelangelo said with a gasp that usually preceded an epiphany of monumental proportions, "Could it be that they were poorly-dressed and broke? Is that it? Is that what you're trying to get at? Or that they all followed a Bohemian lifestyle? Or that they were all artists of some kind? Oh, wait!" he said in affected shock, "Could it be that you're referring to the fact that most of them were gay? Only most of them weren't gay, goddamn you! You're really reaching with that! Maybe half of them, but not most, so there!"

He realized right away that having a miniature rant about the subject matter wasn't necessarily the brightest thing in the world he could have done.

"Geez, don't overreact or nothing," Raphael said, "Did we hit a sensitive topic for you?"

"Yes," Michelangelo said through gritted teeth, "Musicals are sacred, and defiling them is a sin against God. Not that I'm obsessed with musicals," he added as he recalled too late that a blazing sign of the fabulous male was a love for musicals, "I meant all movies, really. Rent is totally a tribute to Americana and, um."

He trailed off; realizing that nothing he could say would make the situation any better.

"Hey, speaking of movies, here's on that you should know. What movie featured two gay cowboys?"

This was Donatello again, who he was really beginning to dislike. He decided that he would get back at him with a retaliation prank that would span weeks, and he would never know it because Michelangelo would never give him an inkling of what his real intentions were! That would show him to be so eerily adept at acting!

When it became obvious that he wasn't going to answer such an obviously loaded question, their Fearless Leader took it into his hands to prompt him. "I don't think he knows about gay cowboys. Here, let's have an easier question," said Leonardo, "Where do people put their clothes?"

"In the closet," Raphael said with apparent glee. "Hey, Mikey, speaking of which, I think you left something in the closet over at April's house."

"Imagine that," Michelangelo said, glaring at him.

"Oh, here's another good question!" Leonardo held up a card that probably asked something like the capitol of Texas with a dramatic flourish, "What is the main river in Egypt?"

"That would be the Nile, right?" asked Donatello with the calm professional tone of a tour guide, "Michelangelo, weren't you interested in the Nile? You should arrange a trip there."

Raphael smirked. "Gee, I don't think he can, what with him being so busy in the closet."

At this point, Michelangelo began to wonder what exactly had compelled him to sit down in the presence of these assholes masquerading as his brothers, and why he was being forced to sit through this punishment. Then he realized that he sure as heck didn't have to sit through anything, he was a free person and could stand up uninhibited and go to the kitchen for a drink as he had previously planned, and to hell with these people and their horribly bad puns and obvious attempts at jokes about his sexuality. Which, of course, they knew nothing about, because he knew nothing about it, and who in the name of sanity did they think they were? No, he would not allow for this any longer!

"Well, it's been fun playing this game of NON-TRIVIAL PURSUIT with you all," he said, standing up so quickly his chair almost knocked over, "But I have to go _over there_ now, in the part of the Lair _not_ reserved for jerks, because I have Stuff To Do With My Evening that does not involve talking to you."

"Watching Broadway musicals of the 1940's?" asked Donatello with a faintly interested tone that would be completely misleading if he hadn't already revealed himself as a prank-pulling, maniacal mastermind that evening.

Raphael leaned back in his chair and looked unconscionably smug. "Nah, bro, isn't it obvious? He's redecorating his room accordin' to Martha Stewart Living."

Leonardo leaned forward over the table and looked at Michelangelo solemnly. "Mikey, while you're attending to the business you have in the closet, could you tell Tom Cruise to come out?"

"Hahahahaha," Michelangelo snapped, "Your brilliant humor stuns me. Except for when it doesn't," he added, then whirled around and headed to the kitchen, mentally smacking himself for his lack of a witty reply. He pointedly ignored the muffled snickers he heard coming from the folding table in the entertainment area.

He supposed that he should count himself lucky that they could tease him over this, or rather that it was something that was considered silly enough to make fun of him about. That meant that they still, thank whatever deity was responsible for that entirely backhanded bout of luck, hadn't discovered anything crucial about exactly who it was he was interested in. He knew that if that one came into play, no one would be making stupid little jokes about being in the closet, because it'd be in their best interests to shove him farther in there and lock the door. He knew that any further and more specific discovery could actually result in him being publically disowned if things went about horribly enough.

It was just that the logic of 'I should be lucky that they think I'm only gay and be happy for this proof' was buried under at least a metric ton of annoyance. He didn't need any of this, not with the rest of the emotional sinkhole that was gradually becoming his free time. He especially didn't need any of the weird physical awkwardness that he was sure as sunlight would come with the knowledge that he was gay, or presumed gay, because he'd seen enough movies to know that outed guys always had the straight friends get all non-touchy (Then again, that just might be a good thing as far as he was concerned, because touching anyone was beginning to feel weird. After all, what if he started feeling strangely about Raphael because of a back-pat?) All of it felt like it was very trivial in comparison to the bigger picture in his life, and the knowledge that he'd be stuck with at least a few weeks of them giving him stupid things like women's underwear and glitter eyeshadow and calling him names like, oh, the Ninja Fairy, as if this was some kind of a big, stupid _joke_ made him feel like grabbing a month's supply of instant ramen and cola and making a temporary shelter out of his room.

Not to mention that he would have to smile and joke along with them, because that was just what he did, that's the way he usually rolled, he was the Mikester, King of Comedy. Any deviance from the norm would have them thinking that something was wrong with him, and he simply could not have that, because that would be one step towards the eventual discovery that would most likely ruin his entire life. Because of this, he'd have to strap himself to the torture device of self-deprecating humor and pretend that all systems were go and everything was a-fucking-okay when it really felt like a large part of his life was eroding away right under his feet.

In short, Michelangelo did not feel up to dealing with this new heap of crap in addition to the Leaning Tower of Crapliness that was now his life.

Lost in these thoughts, he opened the refrigerator and pulled out the last can of Sprite. He had enough time to think with sort of an absentminded frustration '_de-caffeinated, of course it had to be a decaffeinated soda, why must caffeine leave me in my hour of need_', when he became aware of the ghostlike presence of Splinter.

He was sitting placidly at the table as if he'd been waiting for him, a cup of tea sending off delicate wisps of steam into the air.

It was testament to how completely wrapped up in his alternate activities he'd been that he had only an instinctive moment of panic before he realized that he hadn't technically done anything that would get him punished in a horrible, inhumane way, and he knew that although practice and sparring had become a little strange, his skill level certainly hadn't dropped. There wasn't anything Master Splinter could want to scold him for except, possibly, for the hellish mess he'd always made of his room, and that wouldn't warrant him waiting up for him like this.

Then again, he could just be simply sitting there enjoying a cup of tea and Michelangelo could have been suffering from an extreme case of paranoia. There was that option, but the odds were relatively low, since he'd discovered that his sense of paranoia was actually a well-tuned grasp of reality.

"Master Splinter?" he finally said, closing the refrigerator door. He'd meant to greet him like a normal person, but it ended up sounding more like the beginning of a question such as: 'Master Splinter, what sort of trouble am I in now and is it too late to back up slowly and forget about it?'

Splinter looked grave. "My son," he said, "You forgot something in the kitchen this evening."

This was about his sloppy habits, then. Michelangelo relaxed, he'd probably left some comics on the table or hadn't put away his cereal bowl. "Oh, really?" he asked, the image of the repentant child, "Sorry about that, sensei. I'll try to clean up better later."

"Indeed," said Splinter firmly, "Or when it comes to this sort of material, it would be best not to read it in the kitchen at all."

And then, his nearly-omniscient, fatherly-figure of a ninjistsu master held up what was clearly, obviously, and downright uncompromisingly recognizable as a gay pornography magazine. At first, the image was so jarringly in contrast that he tried to separate the two in some way. There was no way that, in a sane universe, Master Splinter could ever be allowed to hold pornography. It simply did not compute. It was like the tooth fairy holding a bloody machete. However, the magazine failed to disappear.

Michelangelo's jaw dropped, he emitted a faint choking sound, and was reduced to a pile of quivering ash.

Splinter continued to hold out the horrifying magazine at arm's length as he waited for an explanation.

Steam wafted gently from the teacup on the table as silence reigned supreme for a few seconds.

Then Michelangelo said the only thing that could be said under such circumstances."That," he rasped, feeling like he'd just been hit in the chest with a semi, "Is not mine!" He said this with the same force of denial needed to repel demons with. "I swear to god, sensei, there is no way I read that crap. I have no idea how it got on the table, but it has nothing to do with me! It's not mine," he repeated, hoping that repetition would somehow prove his innocence, "I have no idea how that thing got there, but I have nothing to do with it! Nothing!"

Michelangelo suddenly noticed that the magazine had his name written on top of the cover in a perfect forgery of his handwriting and was hit with a clear flash of insight. His brothers had clearly been turned into vampires, because this was undeniable proof that they _had no souls_.

And Master Splinter was still standing there, waiting for an explanation as to why he'd felt so compelled to leave his porn mags in public view. Surely he didn't believe he'd do something so insanely suicidal, did he? He never left his comic books out on the table, let alone any pornographic material that he just flat out didn't own. This was just practicality.

So, Michelangelo clearly explained why the magazine did not belong to him, how it could not have possibly in any feasible universe so much as passed through his untainted hands, how he had no interest in what the magazine had to offer, and how he hadn't the faintest idea how the thing had his name written on it in his handwriting, although he actually did have at least three ideas about who'd done it.

He explained this very patiently with a lot of emphasis, multiple explanation marks, and a lot of repeating important facts, such as "This is not mine. Mine, this is not. Not mine, this is." Splinter waited patiently with great benevolence for him to fizzle out and face the parental consequences.

When he was finally out of breath, Splinter finished his tea with great aplomb, stood, and gestured toward his room. "Come, my son. We must talk."

"What?" he asked, "Oh, no…please, can we just say that you scolded me about this and move on? Please? Pretty please? In the interest of my sanity?"

Master Splinter gave him a look that was easily a hundred times more frightening than any of those directed at slackers during training, even more terrifying than the deadpan, fearsome look of utter parental disapproval when they disobeyed some mighty law. He had a wise, knowing expression compounded with twinkling eyes. He looked like a benevolent, fatherly rat Santa. Michelangelo felt himself react to this on a purely subconscious level and his senses screamed at him to run, for it was now time for The Talk.

Running, however, was clearly not an option. Neither, sadly, was pouring holy water on his brothers from the rafters to see if they took any ill effect.

Michelangelo followed Splinter through the sliding shoji screen that separated his room from the rest of the house with the slow, reluctant tread of the condemned.

The room was always softly lit, presumably to lend a Zen-like ambience to the atmosphere and make it a haven of peace and tranquility. Due to the circumstances, though, he had a very hard time getting into the mood the lighting was supposed to give him. He knelt nervously on the floor and tried to look anywhere but at Splinter. This was difficult to accomplish, seeing that the room was bare of everything but what his father considered essentials, thus giving him nothing to really look at.

He stared at the floor and tried not to die of mortification.

"Michelangelo," Splinter began, "I realize that discovering your orientation in these matters must have been a difficult process for you, but you must know that there is no need to fear any consequences that may result from your family being aware of your preferences. We are still a family, and we will all respect your decisions."

He refrained the urge to tell him that sticking a naughty magazine on the kitchen table where someone was bound to find it and treat him to the dreaded Talk wasn't anywhere near his concept of respect. That wasn't an option, so he just nodded at the floor. "Yes, sensei."

Splinter looked off into space as if consulting an invisible notebook for further direction. Either that, or he was awaiting guidance from the mystical angel of parental talks. Michelangelo hoped, really and intensely hoped that he wouldn't find anything else to say.

"I realize you boys are growing…older," Splinter continued. Apparently the previous pause was just to give him false hopes. "And naturally as you mature you would begin to develop more mature interests. I realize that your interest in television and modern movies may have given you more information on this subject than I can give you, but with this new aspect of your maturation brought into light, I feel that I must reassure you about some things."

At that point, the part of his brain that had set aside the problem of Master Splinter seeing the magazine and leaping to the entirely wrong conclusion suddenly flashed an enormous light bulb at him. This was _real_. This was _happening_. His father had been given the impression that, in his free time, he went to his room to look at pictures of naked young men coated with various kinds of grease to make their skin shine with a delicate sheen, and wildly fantasized about doing unspeakable things to them. That meant that every time he requested privacy in the sanctitude of his room, he would smile benevolently at him with his kindly Santa twinkle and expect him to go forth and bury himself in porn.

He would never be able to survive one day of that. The embarrassment would cause him to spontaneously combust.

"Look, I think we're all dealing with a misunderstanding here," he started nervously, "I mean, the magazine wasn't even mine."

Splinter gazed at him with a generous amount of sympathetic wisdom. "My son, you must not attempt to repress what is true to yourself. You must accept it, or else it will fill you with doubt and confusion, and ultimately break you. There is nothing wrong with your attraction towards men, and it does not change who you are."

Michelangelo suffered the fleeting, suicidal impulse to break down and tell him that, as a matter of fact, something was horribly wrong with his new interest in a certain guy in his life, and that guy was his brother, and how did he think of _that_? And he would then say that there was no way it couldn't change who he was to be like this, and there was no way he could ever again go back to what he'd been before, because it had to be completely and hopelessly impossible. And then he'd leave for the far reaches of Japan and live as a hermit.

The desire lasted as long as a single flicker of a flame before he sunk back down into mute resignation of his situation. "Yes, sensei," he said, looking at the floor again.

'I would discuss with you what the current slang refers to you as 'the birds and the bees', but no doubt you are already aware of it."

"Yes," he said quickly, his voice coming out in a squeak, "I already know."

It occurred to him that this must be somewhat awkward for Master Splinter as well, but he seemed as poised and unruffled as always. Clearly incense had stress-relieving qualities.

Then something horrible happened. Splinter decided to apply his usual teaching methods to The Talk, and took it upon himself to relate Michelangelo's new discovery with an informative moral tale. Obviously he had no proverbs or myths from ancient Japan that would apply to the situation, so he began to tell him, in his haiku-like storytelling speak, the tale of Benjamin and Cody, two closeted homosexuals that debuted in the thrilling soap opera he'd been following for two months.

While Splinter talked about Benjamin's outbursts of violence and Cody's long meetings with the school counselor, and both of their unjust experiences with their peers and the close-minded culture, Michelangelo stared and stared and his mind froze with the numb, uncomprehending horror of it all.

It was as if April had used telepathy to take over his father's body in order to perpetuate his misery.

In the end, Benjamin and Cody both realized that it was okay to be homosexual, moved to Vermont, and got married.

When it was all over, Splinter told him that he hoped that their talk had given him something to think about and that he would feel more secure about the changes he was undergoing.

"Yes, sensei," Michelangelo said with every appearance of perfect honesty, filled with his intense desire to flee in the face of the madcap adventures of Benjamin and Cody, "I think I will. I'm completely happy to be gay, I'm totally free with the fact that I like guys, and sooner or later I'm going to redecorate the lair in fabulous colors like chartreuse and fuchsia, and run my own show called Queer Eye for the Turtle Guy."

This appeared to go over well, and he was dismissed and allowed to go collect his sanity.

* * *

His plan, as much as it was, had been an excellent one. Or perhaps it would have been excellent had it not been so completely haphazardly conceived as he'd walked out of Master Splinter's room in a carefully-controlled haze of anger. The plan was simple: he would go find his brothers, and he would threaten to kill them repeatedly until they were dead, and then he would talk about killing them some more, and then he'd tell them how he would kill them, and eventually he'd tire of the death topic. When he tired of the death topic, he'd intended to inform them that they were all the biggest jerks ever to walk the surface of the Earth.

This had seemed entirely within the bounds of plausibility at the time.

He realized later that it would be much easier to be a snarling, wild, threatening creature of elemental fury if Donatello hadn't managed to hook up a surveillance camera and a bugging system up in Master Splinter's room and therefore had a tape recording of him saying 'Queer Eye for the Turtle Guy'. Apparently everyone had just crowded around the surveillance camera to watch the most humiliating moment of his life like it was the Super Bowl. Leonardo had even burnt popcorn in celebration, because he still couldn't work the microwave right. Michelangelo wondered if he'd feel in such high spirits if he knew what was _really_ going through his head, and decided that if it came right down to killing people, his dear fearless leader would be first to go. Then, he'd be entirely cured of any problem. HAHAHAHA.

Meanwhile, his brothers were still having way too much fun with this.

"Will you guys shut up?" he snapped.

Evidently not, Donatello was re-playing the reel of the Moral Tale of Benjamin and Cody with the camera focused right on his gaping, horrified face, and Raphael was inserting a witty commentary as Master Splinter's voice discussed the aftermath of alcohol consumption and partying.

"Here we have the rare and exotic Mikey, far away from its native habitat, Planet Fabulous," he said, pointing at the screen. The image of him playing there seemed to react to this comment and flinched, probably because of some detail in Splinter's musings had hurt his brain.

"We're observing the natural reactions of the Mikey under assault," Donatello said in a smoothly pleasant voice, sounding like a scientist on a documentary, "Observe the widening of the eyes as our trained professional relates a traditional telling of the Romeo and Juliet story to it. Our researchers have agreed that this no doubt implies that the Mikey lacks a sense of romance and clearly does not appreciate the classics."

"Also looks like he's getting a headache," Raphael observed.

Donatello nodded, as if this was all completely expected. "Naturally, the brain of the Mikey is a very fragile, small, and delicate thing. It can't withstand too much stimuli, and so we see that the subtlety of the story is completely lost on him as his brain begins to deteriorate."

"Which is a real shame, seein' as he didn't have much there to begin with," Raphael said.

At that point, all three of them broke out into what might have been the tenth helpless fit of laughter that night.

"Ahahahahaha," Michelangelo cackled darkly, baring his teeth in what he hoped looked like a smile.

He decided if this hadn't stopped within the next fifteen minutes, he would pack all of his things and go live with someone else for the next few days. Preferably someone who respected his privacy and didn't go about spilling his secrets to his evil older brothers. Leatherhead, maybe. He seemed like a reasonable fellow.

"Okay, we have to stop this," Leonardo said, taking command of the chaos.

Michelangelo looked upon him as a beacon of hope.

"This is all just silly, and we're losing sight of the bigger issue here," Leonardo continued manfully, "And I'm sure all of us want to get to the more serious issues at hand before we get bogged down with all this irrelevant material. And so I ask…are you really going to redecorate the Lair? Can we reserve some sections with police tape?"

Any feelings of gratitude he'd had towards his older brother abruptly died. "Look, dude," he started, deciding that he had to put his foot down and inform everyone that he'd had quite enough torture for one day.

"Aw, man, you can't call him dude," drawled Raphael from the chair he was sprawled over, "What's wrong with you? You gotta call him girlfriend or honey or something. And do one of those limp little wrist flicks."

"We should get him a tutor or something," Donatello mused, "As his brothers; it's our solemn duty to see that he's fully educated in the way of the Modern Gay New Yorker."

"I'd like to take this moment to point out what ENORMOUS JERKS you all are being…" Michelangelo started, but was neatly and efficiently cut off by Leonardo, who suggested that this was like ninjitsu and he just needed extensive training. Obviously.

This idea was fully supported by everyone except for Michelangelo, who clearly had no say in the matter, and a rousing discussion about the benefits of renting enormous amounts of gay films to give him some exposure to his new sub-culture was carried out. And carried out some more, and then discussed, and then picked apart for further discussion. In fact, they just wouldn't shut up about it. Maybe they lacked the capacity. Maybe it was natural. Maybe it was Maybelline. Not only that, but the jerks kept blocking his exit when he tried to escape.

When Donatello tried to make his shell cell have the ringtone of 'Queer Eye for the Turtle Guy," Michelangelo decided that whatever the source of this creative insult-mongering was, he had lost every strand of patience he owned. He was lingering on the indistinct borderline between irritated, tired and angry and downright homicidal, and since fratricide was still illegal, it was probably time to leave.

He considered tossing a few smoke pellets on the ground and leaving in the ensuing chaos. This seemed like the most brilliant idea to come to him that evening, so while Donatello tinkered madly about with his precious shell cell, he found the sewn-in compartment in his belt for the smoke pellets, rolled one idly between his thumb and one finger, and slowly drew it out.

It was at that point that Casey walked through the door.

"Hey, guys," he said, looking a little pale, but gamely carrying the VHS of Home on the Oakland Range like it was a peace offering, "Uh, I thought you all might want to watch this movie, and, uh, Mikey and I could go off and get some microwave popcorn."

The expressions written across the faces of his brothers warned of imminent hell.

* * *

He should have just thrown the smoke pellet. If Renet showed up and offered him the chance to go back through time and change something, he would have thrown the thing down on the floor and left everyone choking on his smoke. Then he would have paid an impromptu visit to Leatherhead, begged desperately to spend the night, and later would have called Master Splinter to inform him that, due to circumstances beyond his control, he'd be taking a short hiatus from the home life for one evening. Yes, it would all have worked out unfailingly.

But he obviously hadn't dropped it, because it had seemed rude.

Because of this appalling lapse in practicality, he had to suffer the tender mercies of his brothers and their collective sharp wit. _Again_. This was insanely repetitive. It tempted him to just ask if any of them had a life or if it was just a slow day. It was Monday, after all, and no one really liked the whole Monday thing, even in the absence of actual school or paying jobs. He frowned upon using that boredom for the side of evil, though.

The very second after Casey had uttered his famous last words; his brothers had grabbed him up by the arms and escorted him dramatically across the room as Raphael uttered the single most horrifying phrase to ever fall from his mouth: "Hey! It's the new boyfriend!" After that his brain pretty much died as it tried to process this new turn of events, and he was pushed in a state of numb incomprehension to where Casey was standing. Casey looked suicidal. Michelangelo didn't blame him. He, too, would feel suicidal if he wasn't so preoccupied with the whole homicide thing.

Michelangelo struggled against their death grips on his arms as he was brought to a stop, "Dudes! You guys are insane! Let go before I start biting!"

"But, Mikey! It's your hot date! Ooh, he brought his hockey mask! He dressed purty for ya!"

Someone, probably Raph, gave him a sort of shove towards Casey and he stumbled a little, and then turned to impale whoever just pushed him with the force of his eyes. His assumption was correct: it was definitely Raphael, and he was giving him a knowing kind of Cheshire cat grin. To his horror, he gave him a wink that implied many terrible things. The gesture was so full of innuendo that it would have been better to have just said something.

Donatello laid a hand on his shoulder, effectively keeping him in place. "Well, come _on_, Cinderella, your Charming Prince has come to rescue you! Go stun him with your ability to flirt and pout!"

"_What_ are you people talking about?" irritated, he tried to shove the hand off of his shoulder, "Look, you do not just push me at strange guys, okay? That's totally uncool. I'm not going to go off with just any guy in sight, got it? Especially not Casey! What put that thought into your heads?"

"Look, Case, he's playin' hard to get!" Raphael said, nudging Casey, "Better go and get him before he drops the glass slipper."

Michelangelo refrained from pulling a Raph and just hitting people. "I'm not playing hard to get. That means there's, like, the possibility of 'getting' in there somewhere, and I will not be gotten! At least not by him! I am un-gettable! There will be no getting! It is a non-getting zone! What do I have to say to make you understand this?"

"Methinks the lady doth protest too much," Donatello said, dragging Shakespeare into it.

"Really?" Michelangelo said through his teeth, at a lack of anything really witty to say in response.

"We can get together a nice honeymoon package for the two of you," Donatello added, "It's the least we could do for you for making our dear brother so happy. Someone should pick out curtains."

Casey seemed to look physically ill at the whole idea, which would have offended him if the feeling wasn't actually mutual. It wasn't that he disliked him or anything; it was just like thinking of having a relationship with him put Michelangelo in mind of sleeping with a caveman. A big, hairy, gorilla caveman with the personality of Raph, and one of those was more than enough as it was. Of course, he wasn't feeling too charitably inclined towards anyone at the moment, so Casey, just by virtue of being there and apparently serving as a prop for his humiliation, was immediately bumped up on the list of people that day who could just fall into a volcano and burn.

"Guys," he snarled, "Shut up."

This failed to have the quelling power he'd hoped for, his brothers just laughed like he'd done something highly entertaining. Maybe he'd have to do it once more with feeling to get it into their thick heads that he was very serious, and in fact considering using the smoke pellets in an unconventional way. Like shoving them down their throats, since nothing else seemed to be making them shut up.

"Casey," Leonardo said, looking very dignified and brotherly, "I have to ask you this: what are your intentions toward our dear, virginal brother? I will not tolerate disrespect from you. I mean, he's very delicate and sensitive, we can't have you upsetting him."

"What?" asked Casey.

"Yeah. WHAT?" Michelangelo echoed in outrage.

"See how nervous he gets?" Leonardo pointed out, "I really must know if you're going to act honorably towards him, because if we see any signs of you getting out of hand, we're going to have to cut this engagement short. Really, we don't want him all flustered." He discussed this in a voice of sensibility, like it was the only reasonable thing to expect under the circumstances.

"Yeah, don't get too rough wit' him, you'll scare him off," Raphael joked, "Ya gotta take it nice and slow, right? Remember, he's new and inexperienced and all."

This struck everyone as hugely amusing.

Meanwhile, he'd had enough. That was it. Michelangelo shoved Donatello's arm from around his shoulders in a single, smoothly violent motion and took a step back, out of arms reach. Smoke and mirrors didn't seem quite physical enough a rebuttal now, but he didn't feel like he could issue a particularly stinging insult, so he just gave them a poisonous glare. His breath was coming in quick, angry bursts, and he realized that it probably had been for some time. Time to flee before meltdown commenced and bathed everyone in the crimson flames of his fury.

"Shut. UP," he managed to say, "All of you can just shut up!" His voice rose considerably on the second 'up', coming out in a harsh snarl, and he turned on his heel and headed straight for the staircase. There'd been a lot more expletives following that statement, but he didn't want to lose it completely. Why was it that he didn't want to explode in a fit of rage? Oh, yes. Secrecy.

Good old secrecy.

He'd managed to make it to the makeshift fire escape stairway and had gone up a few steps when someone grabbed hold of his arm and tried to tug him back in the direction of Casey and the others and down off of the staircase. Michelangelo decided with sort of a faraway coldness that he was really tired of people grabbing at him, so he casually reached up, still holding onto the railing, and pinched the hand. Hard.

"Hey!" Raphael, since of course it was Raph who couldn't understand that 'shut up' was a clear and obvious demand to be left alone, yanked his hand away and gave him a whack on the head, still grinning like nothing at all had happened "What're getting all huffy for, Cinder…"

He didn't get to finish that last comment because Michelangelo, seeing him through the foggy red lens of anger, kicked him hard and sent him flying off the staircase and a few feet away into the room below them, skidding on the floor with a scraping crash that was almost satisfying to hear. Behind him, Casey, Donatello, and Leonardo just stared at him with wide eyes, looking completely stricken, as if they'd seen something in the universe go fundamentally wrong.

Michelangelo glared down at them from his perch, "Now _stay_ down there, you bastards!" he nearly shouted. Without waiting for a reply, he turned and headed up the staircase with as much speed as he, a ninja, could muster, stalked into his room, and slammed the door. Then he slammed it again, for emphasis.

He was debating slamming it a third time when it opened of its own accord and revealed a severe-looking Leonardo, who gave him his stern, schoolteacher look that usually meant that he'd done something completely unacceptable.

He also, Michelangelo noted, hadn't even bothered to knock on the door. It wasn't like it would have been hard to give the door just one cursory knock. After all, why have doors installed if they were going to be treated as if they were nonexistent?

"Michelangelo, I have no idea what compelled you to kick Raphael off the staircase, but that was extremely dangerous and could easily have given him severe injuries," he started in his infamous lecture tone, "Now, I don't know why you overreacted so much, but I think that you need to calm down and stop being so overly-sensitive."

Leonardo looked at him as if waiting for a response, no doubt one full of contrition and obedience. As Raphael would say, screw that. He was not at home to Mr. Reasonable right now.

He narrowed his eyes at the older brother who'd become the focus of his life and realized that he really could learn to hate how absolutely self-importantly clueless Leonardo was for having the absolute brass nerve to swagger in here and dictate to him how he should react to this situation, as if he was completely and totally innocent and without blame.

"You," he hissed in a low, distinctly wrathful tone, "How _dare_ you? You utter PRICK." Michelangelo paced over to the door with the furious intent of a hunting cat, "Let's talk about proper etiquette, Leo! You see this?" he knocked on the wood, "It's called a door. When I close that door, it means that I want to be left aloooone. By myself! As in, without you or any other one of those jerkwads downstairs hanging out and making my life miserable, okay? Is that too hard a concept for you to get? Do I need to write a sign or something to make it clearer? And if you really have this pressing need to talk to me, you can just KNOCK. You know, knocking on the door? It's like this!"

Michelangelo knocked the door with one fist.

"But, no!" he ranted, "Apparently that's too hard for our fearless leader! Knocking doors is too pedestrian for you, because you're so important you just have to be heard, do you? And not only that, but you and only you know exactly how to react to your brothers making fun of you all night about your preferences. Hey, you're right! Maybe I should have just backed away smiling and nodding like a good little boy, or maybe I should have just thanked for being such generous creatures, paying so much attention to little old me all day! Is that it? Well, thank you so fucking much! It's more than I deserve! If you don't mind, I'm going to sit here in my room and bask in the glorious tribute that has been shown to me!"

Leonardo looked like he'd just walked into a tiger's den, which was fine with him. It wasn't like he'd wanted to go telling everyone about his problems, they were apparently just public knowledge now. Not even that, they were entirely the _wrong_ problems, and not only were they completely not related to him, apparently his family took pleasure in tormenting him about his fake personal life. Well, that was all well and good for them. It looked like this was the whole closeness and familial support Master Splinter was talking about, and they could just have it and the green tea and his moral and meaningful soap opera tales, and together they could rot in the nether hells.

Meanwhile, he wanted to keep yelling at Leonardo until he got upset, or angry, or jointly upset and angry, and not because he wanted to have a huge fight with him so much as because he wanted to let out some of his own problems. He really should have felt bad for venting it out on him like so much verbal vomit, but he wasn't in the mood to be reflective. He felt angrier than he'd been in months. The Shredder hadn't made him angry like this, and he'd broken his legs and threatened the lives of millions. Leonardo was just clueless. It didn't make sense.

"Hey," Leonardo said hesitantly, "Look, I can see you're upset."

Leonardo had obviously taken some mental steps backwards and was now attempting the logical tone he sometimes used when Raphael was acting up, which made him even more mad. Michelangelo knew exactly what he was trying to do, he could read into tones and read his brothers' intentions like no one else could, and he didn't like that Leo thought he was dumb enough not to notice his obvious attempts at deflection.

"Really?" he snapped, "_Really_? Well, congratulations. I guess there's a first for everything."

He heard Leonardo's intake of breath and felt for a moment like taking it all back, like gathering all the words up and throwing them out like so much garbage and telling him he hadn't meant it, not really. For some reason he didn't, either because the equivalent of a small ocean of frustration was pouring out, and something as small as guilt would just get smashed against its force, or because of the way his brother was just still standing there in the doorway, soldier-straight, arms folded like a disciplinarian. As if he could just dictate everything away, as if he could do anything but make things worse.

"And now that you've used your finely-tuned investigative skills to see that I'm mad, what do you think you're going to do about it? Oh, I see! Barge into my room and give me a lecture, because that technique works so well with everyone, right? What gives you the right to come in here and pull your schoolteacher talk on me about having a fight with Raph? What's wrong? I mean, it's not like it's something that hasn't been done to death before, right? Are you mad that I'm stealing your shtick? Feeling left out on all the fight action? Well, sorry, I'll make sure to invite you next time with a nice little memo edged in gold. And if that isn't good enough for you, you can just go to hell," he spat out the last line, glaring at him, shaking with emotion.

Leonardo was still just standing there dumbly with his hands to his sides; the unexpected verbal attack had left him completely voiceless. He just stared at him, anger and hurt working their way into his expression like water running down thawing ice.

For an instant, Michelangelo felt a compelling, urgent need to just pull him in closer and damn everything else, desire so strong in him that it seemed, in his artist's perspective, to glow as liquid blue-white as flame from a welding torch. Then it died so suddenly it left him exhausted, shaking, physically overwhelmed by his own emotion.

"Just get out," he said, and his voice was flat and almost numb. "Get out!"

And Leonardo closed the door.

* * *

When Michelangelo was well and truly miserable, he would always curl up as much as he could, pulling his knees against his chest, wrapping his arms over his head and closing his eyes, like he could hide from emotional pain or at least ignore it. Humans curled into the fetal position, regular turtles would withdraw in their shells, so he didn't know from which he got that particular trait from, but it always surfaced without fail when he was feeling hurt, internally bruised in an intangible part of himself. He felt the acidic tang of bile rising in his throat and he swallowed convulsively.

He didn't know what time it was because his alarm clock, one of the old-fashion tin ones that rang off like a gong, was sitting in the bunk bed and he didn't have the energy or even the desire to get up and retrieve it. When Leonardo had left, he'd gone to the furthest corner of his room and just sat there with the lights out, feeling like a blanket or an object, a thing that had just been dropped to the floor. But then again, he almost wanted to feel as empty as an inanimate thing would feel, because now that longing was different. It was more than sick; it was disgusting, repulsive, it was wrong to want someone like that when he knew he was hurting him, when he wanted him to hurt. To feel that strange and alien _longing_ twisting right alongside his anger was disturbing, intrinsically wrong. What did that mean for him? What could that mean about how he felt about Leonardo?

Michelangelo remembered reading about how incest was often forced, how the victim would suffer from depression and guilt, how the incestuous sibling would enjoy the control, the domination. He moaned, breathlessly because he felt he really couldn't breathe, and muttered that it wouldn't be that, it could never be that, he couldn't ever do that to his brother. It couldn't be true. Before any of this happened, what seemed like a century ago, he'd always thought 'molester' as dark, shadowed figures in alleyways with knives or guns, not as himself.

Of course, it barely mattered, because Leo probably hated him now.

Okay, well, naturally he hated him. He'd just told him to go to hell. The whole conversation, if you could call it that, kept rewinding and replaying in his brain like an agonizing and horrendous guilt trip theatre. It followed up with a whole train of thoughts that chattered nervously, like a row of fearful children, _"Why did I say this? How could I have said that? What was wrong with me? What is wrong with me? How could I?" _and then _"It was their fault! They wouldn't stop! Why couldn't they have just stopped?"_

Raph could hate him, too. He'd shoved Raphael like really meant it, kicking him off the stairs and into solid brick floor. He could hear vestiges of that scraping sound as his shell dragged against the floor, the thud as his body hit, remembered the dizzy satisfaction that came with it. He'd attacked his brother, he'd wanted to hurt him and see it in his eyes. (_Of course you did. Look what he did to you_.) He exhaled and rubbed a balled-up hand at his eyes, like it could wipe the thoughts away or even wipe the event from existence. To take away the laughter, the jokes, the anger and humiliation. The sound of his brother hitting the ground.

He'd heard them downstairs for a while, the hushed sounds of his brothers and Casey's more strident tones carrying on a conversation, voices raising and lowering as if in argument, and then the dry whoosh of the door opening. Then silence. He wondered what they'd talked about, and then tried not to wonder because none of it could be good for him. It just fed the creeping sense of paranoia, that they thought he was sick, that they'd find out somehow, Donatello would find out through some brain test or worse, Leonardo would just someday look at him and just know.

Michelangelo hated feeling like he couldn't get his head straight, like there were too many things so much larger than himself to tackle. He'd never faced a problem alone before, not really alone. It felt like he was being swallowed whole.

There was a timid knock on the door. It made him think that the person on the other side of it expected some kind of explosion. _Another_ explosion, anyway.

He didn't reply, using the old childhood logic of 'ignore it, it will go away'.

The door opened anyway with a careful creak, and the background light of the dojo illuminated the shape of one of his brothers standing there, black and solid shadow in the few seconds before his eyes adjusted to the sudden brightness and filled him in on the details. A sharp jolt of panic (_hope?_) pricked through his chest for the split second he thought it was Leonardo come back to check in on him, then his mind identified the figure as Donatello. He was carrying a tray in his hands that steam was rising from, wafting the scent of chicken broth into his room.

"Hey," Donatello said, in the tone of voice used to address trapped animals.

Michelangelo just looked at him without answering, still hooked on the idea that if he was really very quiet and made no sudden movements, his brother would get bored with him and move away.

"Well, um…" His brother's voice was bland, quiet, soothing in an unforced way. "I brought you dinner. Uh, it's instant ramen night, I'm afraid, Leonardo tried to cook again. We'd have ordered pizza, but Master Splinter laid down the pizza quota rules. "

He was waiting for him to respond, to maybe whine a complaint about the ritualistic injustice of limiting their junk food intake, or to remark about Leo's bad culinary skills, or something. Michelangelo didn't know exactly what it was Don wanted, but it was clear that he was going to linger until something happened according to whatever mental plan he had planned out. He was quiet still, not because he didn't want to speak to him or because he was angry, but because he still didn't quite trust what he'd say.

Donatello turned his head and took the room in. "Mikey," he said slowly, "You're afraid of the dark."

He felt like laughing at that, at Donatello feeling like he had to remind him of his own fears. Like he needed to be told every now and then, or he'd forget. He didn't because he had the feeling that it would be the half-crazy, painful kind. Michelangelo hadn't even thought of the frightening things that the darkness always seemed to hold for him, hadn't even dwelt upon the Saturday Night horror movie specials. Hell, maybe he didn't even need a night light any more. Every cloud had a silver lining.

"Yeah," he said quietly, "It did occur to me."

And left it at that, inviting nothing but silence.

There was a delicate clink of metal against metal as Donatello laid the tray down on a shelf near the door, reached out, and flicked the light switch, bathing the room in sudden, fluorescent glow. He blinked away the glare and shifted position, moving his legs so he could more easily leap into a standing position if need be. "You know," he said resentfully, "I was kind of enjoying the whole silent contemplation thing in the dark. Very good for meditating, the dark is. Also, I'm a ninja."

Donatello sighed and shifted the tray from the shelf to the closest clean, flat surface. "Just at least eat your dinner, will you?"

Michelangelo narrowed his eyes at him slightly. "Tell you what, dude. I'll eat the noodles like a good boy when you tell me what you came in here to say. I'm a little tired of this 'I'm your annoyed mom' vibe from you guys, and I'm not too dumb to tell what a meaningful discussion is when it lingers around in my room like a bad odor. The surfer accent didn't break my brain, y'know. Did Leo send you to lecture me?"

He could have said more, but what he said was already more than enough. He felt like Raphael probably felt all the time, nervous and angry, on the edge of having his pent-up energy spill out into something willful and undetermined. That wasn't right, either, he knew he wasn't meant to behave like this, it didn't suit him, but he was tired of it, tired of everything, and right now he just didn't want to start dancing around the subject he knew was going to come up.

Donatello wasn't the lecturing type, though. He was more into explanations, always standing with his feet planted firmly and his hands gesturing a million places as he eagerly discussed whatever topic was on his mind. So, Michelangelo wasn't surprised when the answer was no.

"I'm not here to lecture," he repeated earnestly, his eyes asking to be believed, "I mean, yeah, I'll admit that they mostly wanted me to come up and talk to you, but I'd have done it anyway without being told. You know that, don't you?"

Michelangelo made a sort of noise in his throat that could have been translated as agreement.

"Look, Mikey," and he looked away, unable to meet his eyes, "Look…I mean, about you being homosexual. I can say with certainty that none of us really mind about it one way or the other, all right? It's…nothing had to do with any negative opinions about that sexuality, it just happened to be what we, er, if you had any interest in a woman, it would have been like that," he added that feebly, like he knew how it sounded, how completely petty it came out to be. How completely uncalled for.

"Really?" Michelangelo asked in a deceptively calm tone, "So I shouldn't take it personally, then? I shouldn't think everyone's homophobic or anything because, hey, it's totally a joke and all in good fun, right? All right, so everything's fair game. So if I'd had a crush on a girl, like maybe _your_ crush on April?"

Donatello looked startled, his shoulders twitched upwards in a flinch. He knew why. Donatello hadn't shared any of it with his brothers, had expected everyone to be far too clueless and absorbed in ninjitsu to take notice of anything, but he'd known. He'd known for months.

He just smiled at him, at his shocked eyes, like he'd discovered the world's greatest secret. "Geez, don't look surprised, dude, it's obvious you're jonesin' on her. BEEN obvious for, like, decades, with the little compliments and the nervous body language and the little looks you give her when you think no one's looking. The others haven't guessed yet, though, and I know she hasn't. I guess you wouldn't mind me going to her house and telling her all about it? We could have a big geek love party just for you, bro. Maybe I should make up a nice book of geek poems and hand deliver, or maybe I should just tie you up in a bow and toss you on her doorstop…"

And then he stopped, because his brother's face was a mixture of horrified embarrassment and hurt, and he remembered Leo's face in the border between the light of the dojo and his shadowed room, struck dumb, stung with the insults he'd thrown at him, and buried his face in his hands. "No. No, I wouldn't. God, Donny, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, bro. I'm sorry," and he felt his eyes sting, his voice choke as he kept on apologizing, and eventually he felt Donatello place a cool hand on his shoulder comfortingly, trying to steady him.

"No, I think I deserved that," and Donatello sounded calm again.

He hadn't, and he wanted to tell him he hadn't, but there was that ugliness again, that desire to hurt, and he'd said something that should have been spoken about when they were at peace with each other, when they were alone and playing minesweeper competitions or when Donny was working and he was working at bothering him. Not thrown in his face like a weapon, that wasn't something he usually did. Michelangelo never thought he could have…or would have ever had the ability to be that cruel. Whatever was happening to him, it felt like poison spreading slowly into his body and breaking him down. He was afraid, genuinely afraid, that his old self was dead and he'd never see it again.

"Casey kind of chewed us out, you know," Donatello said musingly, "Especially Raph, who is kind of sullen and brooding at the moment. After it...well, everyone agreed with him eventually, but he stormed out before any of us could really tell him that he was in the right for once. He basically called us all assholes, but he had some more eloquent points than that one."

Michelangelo didn't remove his hands from his eyes. "I don't like Casey, you know," he said, "I'm not lying."

"Okay," said Donatello, and they were quiet again for a time.

He finished his ramen in the silence, his fork clinking against the porcelain of the bowl, and his brother didn't say anything or even really look at him. It was like he was waiting for him to confide on his own, to open up like he usually would. Michelangelo usually hated silences like that, would try to fill them up with jokes and babble about his comic books, world news, an awesome new band, anything to kill the quiet. Now he just ate without talking, without relating any stories about WOW or online roleplay, looking down into his bowl as if he could divine something from the contents.

When he was done, his brother loaded the plate and bowl back onto the tray and headed out, but looked back from the threshold of the room and said his name quietly, like he was checking if he was sleeping.

"What?" he asked.

"Mikey, none of us wanted to hurt you."

He didn't say anything, and Donatello left.

It struck him later that maybe it was better that he should just be left alone.


	4. like a castle made of sand

**Growing Pains and Orange Bitters**

**Chapter Four:** _like a castle made of sand_

By: Serendipity

**Standard Disclaimer**: Mirage comics may own their bodies, but their hearts live on among the fans! You know, spread out in some kind of ethereal…spirit-like…way. However, I do not profit for my small spiritual bit of them, and really that's all that matters here.

**Author's Note**: I'm going to have to go out on a limb here and say that this one was probably the most structured of all these chapters so far. Took up a lot of diagramming space in my notebook, this one did. Well, what was going to be in this chapter actually turns out next chapter, because of my horrible lack of appropriate estimation when it comes to how long certain events are going to take.

(Seriously, this whole fanfic idea was meant to be a one-shot, and now it's this multi-chapter epic. Shoot me dead, mum.) Hence, this shorter-than-usual chapter to do some set-up work. Meanwhile, I'd like to thank everyone who's been reviewing for their compliments about my portrayal of the characters. It really means a lot to me to know that everyone's coming across in-character, and people are enjoying my story.

* * *

Michelangelo supposed that he must have slept at some point during the night, but he held no real memory of doing so. There was sort of a hazy recollection of trying with all his might to finish a four-hundred piece jigsaw puzzle of two tigers tackling each other in tall, golden grass. He sort of remembered three o' clock in the morning rolling around with him sitting there on the cleared-out section of the floor, cursing incoherently at how the tigers and the grass were all the same colors and how it was darn near impossible to sort any pattern out of it. Then, he supposed he could have slept on the floor for some time, because he'd felt stiff and his muscles were cramped when morning rolled around, and that usually happened when he'd been sleeping in a funny position. 

Also, his arm had been asleep, and arms just didn't do that all by themselves. That had been at five-fifty, and he'd stared blankly at his dead appendage and somewhere in the back of his mind a Donatello voice said: "Mikey! You've got both your arms!" He'd realized in a foggy sort of way that he'd never had that particular remark explained to him, puzzled over it for a while, and then his brain went off the rails again and he'd gone back to the actual puzzle. Eventually, possibly after more elusive sleep, his mind cleared a bit and he noticed that he'd actually been constantly taking apart and putting together the same group of mismatching pieces all night long.

Jigsaw puzzles were clearly a form of insanity so fearsome, they caused immediate amnesia. This was the conclusion that came to him after a long night of trying to do anything _but_ think. He didn't want to sleep either, because his dreams pulled him into a fragmented dreamscape of broken images and intense sensations.

In those dreams, he was always with Leo, either beneath him, pressed painfully against the packed dirt and grass of a deserted forest in the dark or the harsh concrete of an alleyway, or in the worst dreams, smothering him from on top. In those, he pushed his brother to the ground and ignored him when he screamed; he was the abuser in the textbooks. And he always, always tried to stop, but his body wouldn't move right, and Leonardo would be cursing him and for some reason, the dreams always tasted like blood. There was never any clarity, no time flow, nothing but a series of scattered feelings, thoughts and words like shattered glass. And the most horrible, horrible thing was how he woke up with his sheets wet and knowing that somehow, disgustingly, a part of him had enjoyed it.

He threw up after those dreams; too, hoping he could vomit out whatever rotten thing was making him dream them.

After the night before, when he'd felt himself wanting Leonardo through his anger, he hadn't wanted to see what dreams his subconscious had in store for him. Six thirty in the morning, and he couldn't remember what he'd done for most of the night. That was fine with him.

Then a very polite knock sounded on the door and Leonardo, sounding kind of subdued and awkward, informed him that it was time for training. Then he said if he wasn't feeling well, he would tell Master Splinter and it would be okay if he wanted to stay in his room some more.

This was probably the equivalent of Genghis Khan telling his army that it was okay if they felt too out of sorts to go and attack China.

Michelangelo went over and opened the door and Leonardo was just standing there aimlessly. This looked very strange, because Leonardo was a very purposeful sort of person. Even when he was just sitting or standing around, he usually looked as if he could, at any second, be thoroughly prepared to leap into action or head off an attack. Not right now. Right now, it looked like someone had whipped out the floor underneath his feet and he was still waiting for another option to present itself.

Leonardo gave him one of his unreadable looks when the door opened. Those, he could usually divine through long years of practice and familiarity, but this one was new. He had a feeling it was unreadable only because there were too many emotions contained in it to pin it down to just one or two.

Also, it became clear to him that now was the time for him to say something, or appear as a creepy, staring hermit lingering in the doorframe of his room. So, he opened his mouth. "Good morning," he said in a strangely cordial tone.

This was a good start. A little like the brainless living dead, but okay as far as normalcy went, and that was really the whole idea. Now he had to add something else to it, or else it would be just another stupid little 'Hi', that people did to relieve tension in a tension-fraught atmosphere. What were they talking about, again? Oh, yes, one of those ninjitsu training sessions and Leonardo's decision that he could be left off the hook just this once. Part of him really wanted to take advantage of this chance, because it came about one in a blue moon, but a tiny logical voice, like a scholarly Jiminy Cricket, chirped in his head and reminded him that only crazy people locked themselves away in their rooms all day, and he was decidedly not crazy. At the least, that was a very bad impression to give.

He came to the realization that he'd been mentally gibbering to himself and subtracted points for discipline."So, practice," he said, trying to sound casual and bored, "I'll be there in a minute." Then he closed the door before Leo could say anything more, because he knew if anything like conversation happened before he managed to get food, he'd do something impossibly stupid.

Michelangelo closed the door on his finger. He counted this as something impossibly stupid and therefore proof of his state of mind that morning.

It got a little better when he went downstairs to join everyone in another rigorous attempt to hone their fighting skills, since the mad scrabble around his room to find where he could have possibly misplaced his nunchucks had sparked enough adrenaline to wake him up a bit.

He'd managed to make it down to the first floor without causing himself any minor injuries, anyway, and he'd performed a very suitable bow before exercises began. Hadn't toppled to the floor out of exhaustion or anything, it was quite an achievement.

And then practice happened, and it was somewhat nightmarish. It wasn't a nightmare because Master Splinter had awoke that morning with a strange and compelling desire to torment them with a wealth of physical brutality beyond the wildest dreams of an ogre, or because he'd decided to focus on the meditation aspect that most everyone couldn't stand beyond a couple hours of.

Everyone was just…bad. There was no other way to describe it but that. When Master Splinter attempted to walk them through the steps of a new form, it seemed as though they all had some form of problem with it, clumsiness, lack of focus, or just lethargy in his case. And then when they were set apart in pairs and told to spar, he was given Raphael as a partner.

Usually this was fun; Raph was his favorite sparring buddy. When they fought it wasn't like fighting with Leo, who was always dead-serious and intent, or Donnie, who followed suit. Raphael was more playful about it with him; he knew how to have fun. Today, they were working under the weight of yesterday's actions, and it was like trying to spar under water, slow and unwieldy, not sure which direction to go. He and Michelangelo would usually engage in epic battles of good-natured insult-slinging. Today, they were quiet, and he felt the pressure of the silence like a weight on his chest.

Their fight was just empty form, half-hearted attacks because Michelangelo was still haunted by the sound of his brother's body hitting the floor the day before, and for some reason or another Raphael was pulling his punches, too. In the end, Michelangelo disarmed him, wrapping his nunchuck around one of his sai and yanking, sending it to the floor with a hollow clattering sound. Then he just stood there uncertainly, not willing to take away the other one. He looked at his brother, but Raphael tossed his other weapon to the floor, spun around, and ignoring Master Splinter's protests, left to fine-tune his motorcycle.

Michelangelo picked up his brother's weapons from the ground as if they were made of glass and handed them wordlessly to Splinter. Then he went over to the entertainment area and sat on the couch and pretended to watch one of the channels on the screen as if it was the most fascinating program in the world. From a long way away, he could hear the sound of Donatello and Leonardo performing their exercises, heard Master Splinter calling out instructions and corrections.

The televisions played a documentary on the living arrangements of meerkats, an I Love Lucy rerun, some automobile-centric show, and the news. Of course, when the TVs were on, they always tried to have one station set on the news. It was discussing something about crime, but that was hardly surprising in a news program about New York City. He watched it with little interest, his attention on the archway that Raphael had disappeared into, the light coming from the screens flickering dimly. Eventually, he gave up looking.

Michelangelo was being informed of the increase in gang activity when practice ended and he was joined by Leonardo and Donatello, their footsteps soft and hesitant, almost lost under the background noise from the blaring television screen. _Almost_, which meant that they'd actually wanted to be heard. He was tempted to ask them what they thought he was going to do if they accidentally did sneak up on him, go nuclear and explode? Turn into some bizarre Mikey Hulk creature?

"I wouldn't bother with the TV, nothing good's on," he remarked as they drew in closer to his peripheral vision, "In fact, everything's pretty boring and depressing today. It's like they all took depressants before signing in, it's horrible. Even Lucy's off kilter, which I find sad. In fact," he added hopefully, "I was just leaving."

When he got up and put the remote down Leonardo and Donatello had what looked like a silent, five-second conversation with their eyes. It probably went along the lines of: 'You talk to him, you are the fearless leader and therefore should have no fear of what he may choose to do to you',' 'No, you talk to him, you lost the poker game last night and also he hasn't tried to bite your head off yet'.

Donatello apparently bowed to Leonardo's eyeball-logic and sighed. "Look, Mikey, about Raph…"

He'd been a bare footstep out of the room, but at his brother's name he stopped abruptly and spun around so sharply that the other two backed up a pace. "What _about_ Raph?" he asked, anger coloring his tone, "I didn't say anything about Raph, did I? Who was bringing him up at all? I never said anything about him, okay? I was just talking about how the television programs today _suck_, and there was no mention of him at all, in any way, in any form! What about him did you want to talk to me about, how he couldn't even look at me during practice today? Is that it? I can't see how that's my problem!"

Donatello made a sound of wordless protest, which Michelangelo drove right over. "Well, I don't think I need to talk about it, all right? I'm not the one having problems! I have no problems," he stated madly, "He could have waited for me to go say I'm sorry about pushing him, but he didn't and he doesn't want to talk to me, so I guess that's fine and settled! It's not like I wanted…he should know I didn't mean it. But he's…"

He realized he was ranting, but couldn't quite bring himself to stop, "Well, fine. That's just _fine_. He doesn't have to talk to me if he doesn't want to. In fact, he can just hate me for the rest of his life if that makes him happy!" Just saying the word 'hate' brought a ball of something prickling and stinging to his throat, closing off his words and making it hard to speak.

Leonardo reached out and tried to lay a hand on his shoulder in a comforting gesture, but he jerked away. He didn't want Leo to touch him, his reactions to him were unpredictable and frightening, and he didn't want any more confusion right now. He didn't want to _want_ him right now. That didn't stop him from feeling guilty when his brother slowly took his hand back and dropped it to his side, curling up it up like it was a weapon that could have hurt him.

"He doesn't hate you," Donatello started, trying to sound reasonable and logical about it all, "No one hates you. Mikey, we're…"

Michelangelo took another step back. "He couldn't even fight me," he said, and went to read comics like nothing happened at all.

* * *

Later, he hung around in the reading nook for hours with a stack of Silver Sentry books. Michelangelo tucked himself in the armchair instead of sprawling out all over it like he always did and proceeded to pointedly ignore the world. 

First of all, he decided, it was perfectly all right if Raphael continued to just plain-out not talk to him. This was not an issue; see, because he wasn't really sure if he wanted to talk to anyone, either. Obviously his problems weren't going to be taken seriously. In point of fact, it would probably do him good to keep some separation, because it wasn't like he was already having some enormous confusion issues with Leonardo. What if it was contagious and he started feeling that way about all of them? He could just be catalyzing it by touching them, or being close to them. He couldn't allow himself to go through it all again.

But, that wasn't right, either, just not talking to Raphael, just closing him out and letting himself be ignored and brushed aside. (_not__ hated because he knew he wasn't, not really_.) It didn't feel right, but neither did going up and apologizing because he was still sure, childishly, that he'd done wrong but Raph had done it _first_. Part of the problem was that he was confused about everything now, not only how he felt and what he wanted but what he wanted for his family, and he wished he could learn to catalog and organize his thoughts. He could stack them into neat piles and sort through them and yes, he could fix it all and make it somehow work.

Somehow.

Michelangelo mulled it over for a while and eventually succeeded only in giving himself another headache, and turned to his comics for respite. When he'd finished the third book and was reading about how the Silver Sentry thwarted the dastardly schemes of his arch-nemesis, Master Splinter touched his shoulder lightly and drew him up and out of his blissful comic-induced reverie. Michelangelo turned to look up at him, blinking in confusion like a deer caught in headlights, and wondered for a split-second if yet another mind-scarring episode was imminent.

"My son," Splinter said solemnly, "I would talk to you about the events of last night."

His mind frittered around unhelpfully and suggested that he tell Splinter that the last conversation ended in disaster and he'd rather not repeat disaster, because the results were disastrous. He recognized this as a bad idea.

"Well, that's…wonderful," he said slowly. Wonderful was not really the correct adjective to be used in this situation. If he'd wanted to be completely truthful, he'd have replaced it with 'unavoidably awful' or 'hideously uncomfortable'. In fact, if he was not polite and respectful at all and instead replied with his truest thoughts, he would have said: 'Leave me alone.'

Some of that must have leaked into his tone, because Master Splinter nodded as if somehow acknowledging it before continuing. "If you would care to join me, I believe we would both prefer it if we were left to the privacy of my room. I have already instructed your brother to remove his devices from the premises." No intonation touched those words, but he might as well have said plainly that he knew about the recording of their discussion the night before, and more than likely did more than just tell Donatello to take out his equipment. This, surprisingly, didn't make him feel any better.

Michelangelo closed the comic with care and delicacy, and went to follow his father for yet another talk. On the way there he passed by the room Raphael kept and maintained his bike in, and saw that it was empty and dark. His brother's tool case lay open on the floor, the steel glinting in the reflected light of their main room. Presumably, he'd slipped out while Michelangelo had been preoccupied with his reading. He turned his head away from the abandoned room, jerking his gaze free as if it had been glued there.

Splinter paced twice around in a tight circle when they arrived in his room, the shoji screens sliding shut with a faint snap. His tail thrashed at the air, showing that he was feeling agitated, and Michelangelo felt a moment of pure, lightheaded panic as he came to the instant conclusion that the jig was up and they'd all Found Out, and his father was about to tell him off for all of it, tell him to get out and not come back until he recovered.

"Michelangelo," he said finally, "your brothers came to me the night before and informed me of the truth of what took place. I had heard very little, and assumed only that you boys were at play, so when I heard the loud noises I believed that you were only play-fighting as you usually do with Mr. Jones. Only when I heard you arguing did I come to check on you all, and by that time, you had made your wishes clear: you wanted to be left alone."

Panic was replaced by slow confusion as it turned out that he was not getting denounced as a pervert, and then spiked into guilt when Splinter mentioned that he'd heard the arguments, had heard the hateful things he'd said to Leo when he'd pushed him out of his room. It occurred to him, laced with the jolt of reliving particularly shameful memories, that he'd heard him tell Leonardo to _go to hell_. Horror overwhelmed his conscious thought and jump-started his tongue.

"I'm real, _real_ sorry," he said in hushed tones, "I mean, I was kind of, uh, angry, and I just…I couldn't handle…I lost it." He waited for the lecture to hit.

But Master Splinter made a kindly dismissive gesture with a wave of his hand."I understand, my son. And while I do not condone the behavior you showed toward your brothers, I have taken into account how much it was instigated by the treatment they initially gave you when you arrived back at our home. You will not be given any punishment for your reaction to their pranks, although I do expect that you will also apologize to Leonardo and Raphael, when they have come to you."

"Yes, sensei," he said, knowing he should feel relieved over not having to deal with any extra chores or extra practice, but not quite managing to do it. He also didn't mention his severe doubts that Raphael would come to talk to him, let alone apologize. An apology from him was like water from the desert.

"I have already spoken to your brothers about their actions, and I am sorry that I could not do so sooner." Splinter laced his fingers together, resting his hands in his lap. His eyes were lowered, he looked at the floor rather than at Michelangelo, and that in itself was very odd. "I told you that they would support you, and I assumed that they possessed the maturity to do so. Instead, they mocked you where they should have accepted and reassured you, and though they meant no real harm, I can only assume that they did much. Part of this is my fault for not speaking to them as well, and for that, I am sorry."

It seemed very wrong to take an apology from Master Splinter, so he fidgeted hopelessly and made various noises of assurance. "I, um," he said with a total lack of eloquence."It's…er…I mean…it's _okay_. Like, well, it totally wasn't yesterday, but you know it's not, I mean, I meant…look, I'm okay with it."

And he _was_. At least, he mainly was, it wasn't as though their teasing hadn't affected him at all. But comparatively speaking, it wasn't much. The problem was that at the heart of it all what they'd done was just a surface problem: something he'd normally had been able to handle without much drama, or at least, without serious drama and damage done to passersby.

He'd been close to an emotional explosion anyway, and instead of gliding towards completion he'd been shoved over the edge. Instead of just being angry, he'd been struck by the burden of his accumulated baggage all at once, and he couldn't cope with it right, because he'd never had to. Michelangelo wondered if that was how his other brothers felt when they were angry, like they were completely under control by their own tempers. He wondered if that was how he had to look forward to feeling all the time, if he couldn't fix what was wrong with him.

Michelangelo wished he could just speak his mind, put his thoughts in order like a list on paper, and tell them to someone who could take his problems from him like they were a heavy load he couldn't lift. But he couldn't speak.

Splinter could presumably divine some meaning from his babble, and nodded. It was sort of a meaningless nod, though, kind of like saying 'uh-huh' or 'I see'. It seemed meant entirely to move conversation.

"Yes, I believe that you will be fine, Michelangelo," he said warmly, "You are more resilient to teasing or injured dignity than some of your brothers. I'm afraid that they on occasion take advantage of this resilience and push too far. Perhaps this experience should teach them that they cannot do so with impunity. You must set your boundaries with them, my son, and keep to them."

Setting boundaries would have been worlds easier if he knew exactly what they were, and the boundaries he knew he didn't want crossed were impossible to vocalize. It struck him that before any of this happened, he'd have jumped with joy about this talk. If used properly, it would allow him to establish and secure a No Smacking Mikey policy, and he would lay down the law about the number of sanctioned head-whacks Raphael could pull off a day. This possibility was definitely an intriguing one, but it required his brother to actually be talking to him for it to go off, and right now he didn't think he was in any danger of getting a playful whap on the head. They might actually be welcome.

He bowed his head, acknowledging the advice."Yes, sensei," he said, but like the advice April had given him, this all felt wrong. It felt like he was just sitting through a play of someone else's life, reading a script of lines of sentiments that never touched his own life. He'd never been good at deception, not like this.

Splinter stood and touched Michelangelo's shell with his hand in a motion meant to reassure. "Your brothers _all _spoke to me and none of them denied their part or their blame in this matter. Raphael in particular was…very affected by what happened," he said gently, trying not to make him feel guilty, but Michelangelo flinched anyway, "He is just as remorseful as the others, but I suspect he does not know how to deal with his guilt, he does not know how to apologize to you, and therefore, he is attempting not to confront you for fear he might make a mistake."

He felt a brief sense of fellow feeling for Raph, who also didn't want to make any horrendous mistakes. Then he remembered that while his brother may not have wanted to sabotage their whole brotherly relationship, he also had huge issues with apologizing or admitting mistakes, and he tended to move straight to the 'hold grudge' option when he felt wronged. No doubt all of these complications were plaguing him, and instead of sitting still and letting him just come over and talk to him, he was prancing around New York fighting crime and trash-talking with Casey.

Apparently it hadn't occurred to him that the person he didn't want to make a mistake with would think that complete and utterly ignoring someone's existence meant that a person was angered beyond the concept of forgiveness. This did not lend too much to the cause of sympathy. This made him feel irritated instead.

"Well, he's doing a great job of it so far," he said with restrained temper.

Splinter sighed. "Raphael is not the best at communicating his emotions," he said, "He lets them overwhelm him, and his pride sometimes blocks him from speaking about them. However, you must not let that fool you into believing that he does not care about what he did."

Michelangelo knew all of that. He just…didn't _like_ it. "Yeah, okay," he said, finally. "I know. I dunno what he's going to say to me or whatever, but it's okay. It's not like he can ignore me forever," he added.

This was true. He was a very noticeable person most of the time. He could be a highly annoying noticeable person if he really applied himself. It was just that, for some reason, he didn't feel like he wanted to be anymore.

* * *

The comics failed to beckon him back into the alluring realm of fantasy when he returned to the chair, so he put them back in their plastic wrappers and stacked them neatly to the side, taking more time with it than usual to kill even a few seconds of time. 

His afternoon passed like molasses through an hourglass, split up only by the scheduled times Master Splinter called them all down for exercises, sparring, or practice. Outside of the whole ninjitsu routine he kept himself busy with stupid, pointless little tasks like painting his miniatures, (a new nerdly hobby he'd taken up in the hopes to get rid of his pesky free time,) organizing his books in strange ways, and on occasion, even sitting down to read something that wasn't graphic novel-related.

It might have surprised his brothers to know it, but he did read actual books when the mood hit him. Aside from the public bookshelf, he had a strange mish-mash collection of children's stories, Stephen King novels and the occasional dime novel stuffed in a box under his bunk, he figured he may as well use them for something. Michelangelo spent a good deal of time reading while hanging upside down from the ceiling, because it was a fun challenge to see how much he could get through before the blood rushed to his head.

Through his second attempted reading of Five Children and It, April called his shell cell. He let it ring twice, looking at her name blinking across the phone's mini-screen before picking it up and answering, and felt momentarily pleased that his ring tone hadn't been tampered with after all.

Casey must have filled her in on the events of the night before; she started off with an effusive apology for the babbling tendencies of her boyfriend, the King of Oafish Behavior, who'd gotten plastered and talkative with Raphael. He was okay with the apology by proxy, which was, yes, all very well and good because it was completely true. He wondered, though, where her own apology for even telling the world-renowned ruler of the loudmouth kingdom about stuff he'd actually told her in private had gone. It seemed that it was a completely obvious logical step: tell Casey something that was meant to be personal and private, and naturally things would be bound to go horribly wrong.

Then she mentioned that she was sorry that they hadn't been able to discuss his crush on Casey, and he decided that there was a good place to insert his humble opinion.

"What," he started, keeping a level tone, "Gave you the crazy idea that I was interested in that guy? Tell me now, because it's really a puzzle to me. I mean, I thought about what strange gaydar-signals you could have been picking up, and nothing hit me. I don't get it."

April sounded quietly proud of herself, like she was a detective congratulating herself on a mystery well-solved. "Oh, it was when you were so awkward around him when you were leaving;" she said knowingly, "I mean, some of what you described in your ideal partner sounded a lot like him."

Michelangelo had the fleeting desire to tell Leonardo that April thought he resembled Casey Jones an awful lot. It almost overwhelmed the surge of frustration he felt when it sunk in that she'd just ruined his life on a hunch. All right, it wasn't his life she ruined, he seemed to be doing that nicely on his own, but she'd at least really trashed his evening.

It hadn't occurred to him, really, to be angry at April. He'd been so busy being enraged at everyone else that April hadn't really squeezed into the jigsaw puzzle of his thoughts. Now she'd definitely gotten his attention.

"Well, it's funny you should say that, because I thought I told you I liked Brad Pitt," he said, trying to keep a leash on his sarcasm, "And _that_ is not Brad Pitt. That is _Cro-magnum man_, April. That is the ruggedly stupid type, not the ruggedly handsome type, okay? I mean, okay, you guys are together so he obviously has some potential as a partner, but he is not my ideal type at all, in any way. And this is not denial speaking," he added firmly, "I know denial, trust me. This is me telling you that you were totally wrong."

"Mikey," she said, in the tone of voice that meant she was trying to reach out to him, "I don't mind that you like him, it's not going to make me angry. I know your brothers were awful to you, but…"

His fingers wrapped a little more tightly around the phone.

"You shouldn't deny your feelings because of it," she finished, "It's okay to like him, really."

"Okay, I'm sure it is," he said, a little shortly, "But I wouldn't know, because I don't. That's your shtick, and I wouldn't want to intrude on it or anything."

April sighed on the other end. It was probably the sigh that got him. It sounded a lot like Leonardo's long-suffering sighs when he thought he was being particularly impossible to deal with.

"Look, this isn't about me not wanting to admit anything, okay? I think last night would have completely blown any chances of being secretive I could have had, and _thanks_ for that, by the way. That was a great idea, telling Casey so he could come over here, because you know how good he is at stuff like this," he heard himself speak very quickly, getting the words out so fast that there wouldn't be any room for his anger to creep in. Some of it did, anyway.

"I don't want him. I don't like him that way. He's not my type. You were wrong, okay? You tried your best and jumped to insane conclusions and you were just WRONG. What's wrong with people who can't just admit they were wrong? It's not like someone's going to come out and beat you because of it, all right? It's okay to be wrong sometimes. It's not Casey. I _wish_ it was," the words burst out like frightened birds from a cage and he was almost staggered by the truth, "I wish it was Casey, but it's just not. Almost anyone else would be better…" he stopped.

There was silence on the other end of the phone.

He finally spoke, sounding resigned, "Look, don't do that again. Don't talk to people about what I tell you. If I ever do it again, I mean."

"Michelangelo-"

"I need to go now," he lied, "It's time for practice."

He hung up the shell-cell and snapped it shut. Then he wondered; hoped really, if he'd somehow misheard that tearful edge to her voice when she said his name.

* * *

Things at home were very different for a while. It wasn't as though anything degenerated or got any worse, there weren't any bizarro emotional rollercoasters or even knock-down, drag-out fights like Leonardo and Raphael got into when they were hitting a rocky period. Everything just sort of shuffled into a strange, fragile plateau, with everyone speaking to him in strange, carefully casual and friendly tones. Except for Raphael, who would mutter incoherent half-word, half-guttural sound things at him. He felt as though they'd strapped sound-triggered explosives to him when he slept, and were trying really hard not to offset the trigger. It was pretty unnerving. 

Leonardo had come over after his talk with Master Splinter, walking in his purposeful and leaderly way, and offered him his apology. The whole thing was clearly laced with the usual self-incrimination that Leo liked to drown himself in when something went wrong. He'd told him it was okay and that he would get over it. Michelangelo also sensed that he was about to be taken away to a secluded area and spoken to at length about his feelings, and so he neatly dodged what looked like a long, brotherly talk by pretending to be very interested in whatever Donatello had been working on in his little workshop.

"So, tell me about your new project, Donnie," he'd said, edging up behind him. "Is it amazing? Will it boggle the greatest minds of modern science? Can it distribute the cellular structure at a molecular level or something? Can it make Julienne fries?"

Donatello had given him a blank look. "I'm fixing the toaster," he said, his tone implying that he'd always known that one day; Michelangelo would snap and have to be medicated consistently for the rest of his life. Then he glanced over to where Leonardo was standing, divined something from the admittedly lost expression on their brother's face, and turned back.

"And you're avoiding Leo," he concluded, waving a screwdriver at him gravely.

Michelangelo cursed his insight. "I'm not," he denied, "I'm…we just happen to be on opposite sides of the room, that's all. If we were going to carry on a conversation, we'd have to yell or something and we don't want to add to the noise pollution."

"Uh-huh," Donatello replied, turning back to the dilapidated toaster. He adjusted something on it. "So go talk to him closer up."

The problem there was that he didn't really want to be too close-up to Leonardo, it tended to have embarrassing and uncomfortable effects on him. He caught himself staring where he shouldn't, zoning out on the conversation and gazing stupidly into Leonardo's eyes, like they were black holes for his common sense. He found himself wanting to touch him even more, and as a consequence ended up carrying on all of his conversations with him at arm's length, his hands behind his back or folded on front of him.

Not to mention those bad dreams were haunting him almost regularly now. He'd had one that wasn't as vivid or visceral as the others, where he'd been lying on a couch explaining to a psychiatrist that he'd been having horrible cravings regarding his brother.

Then the psychiatrist looked up and it was Donatello, and he'd confessed that he, too, experienced such feelings and that he should not be bothered by them. This confession was followed by Raphael's, who had been lying next to him the whole time, staring thoughtfully at the ceiling. To add to the insanity even more, a regular parade of people, including Casey and April, walked in and asked if that was the meeting place for Leo Sex Anonymous.

All of them were discussing his eyes when Leonardo walked in and informed everyone in a take-charge manner that he wanted to have sex with himself too, he was that awesome.

Then Master Splinter walked in and opened his mouth, but Michelangelo ripped himself out of the dream and promptly fell off of his bunk bed with a tremendous crash, shaking with the horror of his subconscious mind. The rest of that night had been spent in nauseous, jittery wakefulness at the kitchen table, where he'd supplied himself with enough black coffee to keep him wide awake for two days.

Eventually, he did end up getting one of those long, intense discussions with Leonardo after few days of carefully dodging him whenever he flashed the 'We Need to Talk' eyes at him. In the end, he got cornered in front of the couch when he was trying to play Kirby, and Leonardo informed him that he wasn't leaving until he listened. Since he'd stolen the game controllers, there wasn't really much of an option there.

So, they had a pleasant brotherly talk, the sort that weren't discussions so much as Leo basically constructing a heartfelt speech and him listening and trying to look rapt with interest. In this case, it was a really poorly-engineered heartfelt speech, since Leonardo kept stumbling over his words and putting things badly, but in the end the message was generally clear and something that could have been said more concisely by just saying: "I'm sorry. I'll try to notice it when you have reached critical teasing mass. We're not going to do it again. Raphael is an idiot."

To be fair, the last part _had_ just been said to him plainly.

He and Raphael were managing to have conversations about things like passing the salt and the weather outside, and they still communicated during missions, but it seemed that their playfully insulting relationship had suffered a lapse. He knew he was trying not to be insulting, it seemed like he'd gone over the edge of caution and hit paranoia. Raphael was taking care not to say _anything_, even when Michelangelo tried to provoke him with his usual joking behavior. Eventually, the joking became a little strained when he realized that he wasn't responding, and he didn't feel justified in taking his humor over the line to try and get Raphael to talk to him.

At first, he'd tried to stick up for Raph a little. He knew that he wasn't purposefully trying to make him feel awful by acting like a robot with him, it was just his natural-born talent. But after a full week of being painfully formal with each other, he was ready to just go up and punch him to get a reaction. Maybe, he'd thought wildly, if they could just get back on the good old solid grounding of occasionally laying beat-downs on each other, the whole thing would be forgotten in the haze of testosterone.

Leonardo tried to talk to him again a few days later, after Michelangelo had been trying to avoid him in the most polite way possible while in turn being avoided by Raphael. He'd walked over to where Michelangelo was sitting cross-legged on the floor, MP3 player pounding out Barenaked Ladies tunes in his ears, or whatever slits he had that could pass for them, and stood there, just watching him. He'd folded his arms and leaned against the wall and made it obvious that he wasn't going to go anywhere.

Michelangelo recognized it as one of Leo's ploys for attention, he'd just stand there and casually invade a person's personal space until they got annoyed enough to call him on it. He'd evidently just come from topside, he smelt of the city, asphalt and smoke and a hint of fresh air.

'_I've informed you to leave_,' his earphones sang at him, _'Cause I can't afford to lose more sleep, I get ill when I get tired, so I'll try to rest if you'll stand guard…_'

Michelangelo hated when songs matched up to real life. It was too cliché, too hackneyed, too much like a bad TV drama. What's more, it was downright creepy. It felt like some little man in another dimension that housed a department that controlled fate was messing about with his playlist. He pressed the button to pause his music and gave Leonardo a patient look. He was getting to be good at staring contests, since so many of them seemed to come his way.

The silence stretched on for a few minutes as Leonardo tried to communicate purely with his eyes and Michelangelo purposefully tried to ignore whatever signals he was being sent. Then they finally resorted to words.

"So," he said slowly, "Nice…weather we're having lately?"

"Why aren't you talking to me?" asked Leonardo, sounding almost pained.

Michelangelo also recognized this as another trait of his, the need to get right down to the source of every problem, the complete lack of emotional circumvention. Where Donatello would have sat quietly and listened for him to speak, Leonardo always tried to throw questions until he got the right answer. It wasn't that he was impatient so much as he wasn't as socially analytical. This bluntness, of course, left him stunned for a second, scrambling for a reply.

"Uh, I am talking to you, bro," he said, managing to sound perfectly confused and hating himself for the fakeness, "I just asked you about the weather. Is it nice? Sunny? Raining fish? Snowing chocolate pudding, maybe? Chocolate pudding is great stuff."

Leonardo just narrowed his eyes, recognizing the attempt at distraction for what it was."You know what I mean," he said, frustrated, his fists balled up at his sides, "I _know_ I screwed up, Mikey, I'm sorry. And I know why you're not talking to Raph as much, but it…what do you want me to do for you? What can I do to make you start acting normal with me again?"

'Leave me alone', he knew, would be the worst possible thing to say to him at that moment. He couldn't have told him that he wouldn't ever act the same way again, even if it just looked like he was, that it felt like every day he was sliding further away from his old self and into something else. He couldn't have told him that he was making him feverish, making him feel like a criminal just by looking at him and making him burn.

"I am acting normal," he said instead, and played the music again, drowning out his brother's reproachful looks and his hurt expression, and tried not to rub at his eyes too hard when he finally walked away, his footsteps slow and even as they always were.

_"__There's your shoes,__" _the voice from the earphones crooned, _"__And there's the door__, p__lease__ don't come here anymore__…"_

* * *

Meanwhile, life outside his family carried on as usual. Purple Dragons still carried on crime heists, the Foot did their mysteriously nefarious deeds under the cover of nightfall, and generic, disorganized criminal elements did things like nab purses and rob convenience stores. He was in no danger of living a static, boring life. This came as something of a relief. In fact, for a while, he almost didn't notice any difference in the way everyone was acting, since real life threw more than enough distractions his way. 

He'd been hanging out upside-down on the couch and trying to learn cat's cradle from a magazine article when he noticed the silence. It was following a particularly dangerous attempt to break into some corporate mogul's high-rise office building for some blueprints that presumably would allow them to abscond with a highly-dangerous piece of technology that would make the Purple Dragons even more dangerous, and they were all enjoying downtime in their own particular ways.

Michelangelo could see Donatello working at something at his desk that was sending off faintly blue sparks, his brows furrowed in concentration, and Leonardo doing katas with the easy, fluid grace he always showed. Raphael should have been out; too, weeks ago he'd either have been watching TV or playing games with him and harassing him for popcorn, or kicking the crap out of their punching bag. But he wasn't, Raph was busy being MIA, and he had the feeling he'd gone aboveground to vent and maybe to hang out with Casey again. Trying to push playfulness on him just didn't seem to be working, and the strange wall of unspoken apologies between them just seemed to be getting wider.

He watched his family and felt eerily disconnected, like he wasn't a part of them. It was the feeling he got when watching the sitcom families on TV or when he glanced into an apartment building and saw people going about their daily lives, laughing and sharing closeness in a world unto themselves. No one was looking at him. It was like he wasn't even there. Like he was a ghost.

He felt conflicted: on one hand, it was good that they were giving him space. It was what he'd wanted; they were listening to him and respecting his wishes and all. He wanted some of that separation, because being too close to Leo gave him the prickling feeling of paranoia that he'd give himself away somehow. But then again, he didn't want to feel isolated, he wanted them to keep bugging him and trying to talk to him, to show him that they were worried by trying to smother him with brotherly talks. He wanted to be alone, but then he didn't. He felt indecisive, confused. Or maybe his problem, as everyone frequently pointed out to him, was a lack of discipline.

As if just thinking about him had alerted his older brother to his presence, Leonardo flowed to a halt and looked at him, and he noticed that Donatello had been covertly looking at him, too. That struck him as suddenly funny, him looking at them and them looking at him, like a bunch of crazy people who'd forgotten the sane way of communication. He decided to try being normal to show them how it was done.

Because, hell, if he wasn't the right one to teach people about normality, then who was?

"Hey," he said, poking his head over the edge of the chair in the manner of a begging puppy, "Does anyone want to get pizza? Is the quota still in effect? We can totally sneak out, you know. We have the element of surprise."

"The quota's still in effect," Leonardo said, because he was a Rules Lawyer with no sense of fun. Michelangelo noticed the slight loosening of tension in his shoulders, his stance shifting slightly in relief. This made the strangely disappointed expression on his face even…well, stranger, since his body language was saying something entirely different. At least someone _else_ felt conflicted.

"We should ignore that," he said coaxingly, turning to Donatello so he didn't have to watch Leonardo looking at him with his strange, questioning stare, "Who needs the food pyramid and its evil? Oh well, if we need to be healthy, we could. We could get Atkins pizza. Wait, that's impossible. I should see if Weight Watchers has a pizza program. If not, that's a gross oversight, and we should correct it. As, like, pizza-loving people with dietary needs."

He reflected on their dining choices. "Or Chinese food," he added, "Chinese is good, too."

"Didn't we have that yesterday?" asked Donatello, leaning back at his chair and smiling at them, "Are there any other options in your junk food pyramid, Mikey? And no bringing up the dessert pizzas. I have nightmares about the dessert pizzas. You made me forswear Hostess products for a full month."

He'd been fond of that pizza. It had chocolate sauce and marshmallow peeps and sprinkles and Twinkies. Of course, there was also the fact that it seemed to make almost everyone else brutally and violently ill. Except for Raphael, of course. He'd joined him on his sweet tooth mission of doom.

"That was…pretty bad," Leonardo said after a moment of contemplating the ancient horror of the pizza.

"It was good," Michelangelo told him sagely, "Dudes; you just have no appreciation for the quality stuff."

Donatello snorted. "You just have no capacity for making quality stuff."

There was a frozen halt in conversation as Donatello looked suddenly uncertain and Leonardo gave him a quick and cautious look. Both of them seemed hypersensitive to whatever he chose to do next. It was a moment that could tip one way or the other, and he felt like rolling his eyes at them for thinking he was going to be touchy enough to blow up at anything.

"You pain me, Don," he said, touching a hand poetically to his heart and speaking with obvious sarcasm. A little pointedly obvious, like he was talking to people who couldn't understand subtlety, "I might have to throw myself off of a balcony because of that statement."

Then they laughed, a little too much, the way they did when someone cracked a joke after a particularly trying battle, but still glad for being able to do so. For that moment, it all seemed normal, like everything could actually turn out right as long as they could keep giggling like Speed-cracked hyenas over a joke that wasn't even that great. It was probably one of those high points in life, just sitting around and being a little bit crazy and having fun with each other, just being brothers. It was funny, but he'd missed it without even knowing what it was.

Eventually, he was the only one left laughing, which seemed to be a cause of concern for the other two. "Mikey, cut it out, it's not that funny," Leonardo said, trying to shake his shoulder to make him stop.

"Shut up, you Rules Lawyer," he said, drunk with glee, "Or I'll force-feed you my infamous Twinkies pizza."

"Well, he's back to normal," said Donatello dryly, and that started him off again because normality seemed so far away from what he was it was absurd.

Eventually they calmed him down enough they could talk about dinner, and after some heated discussion everyone decided that the food rules could be flouted for this one occasion as long as Master Splinter gave his consent, which he naturally did. The junk food quota rules were usually just guidelines, anyway.

They ordered an excessive amount of fried chicken, since pizza and Chinese were out of the question, and they sat down and managed to not totally frustrate Splinter with their lack of dining etiquette. They'd started talking about something stupid and trivial, like whose favorite football team was winning, even if Leo and Donny were just lukewarm about football and didn't bother to raise as much fuss as Casey or Raphael did when the subject of teams came up. Splinter smiled at them with his wise and caring father smile, and it looked like it was going to be a pretty okay evening, after all.

Then Raphael stormed in with a knife wound traced over his shoulder, blood crusting down his arm, and ruined the whole thing with news of yet another attempt at the safety of the city as a whole. Business as usual.

* * *

It turned out that the place they'd thought the mystery-clouded Weapon of Mass Destruction was being stashed in actually turned out to be a decoy building, and Raphael and Casey had just managed to spot the thing as it was unpacked from a large crate in a generic warehouse out by the docks. This showed a lamentable lack in imagination by the Purple Dragons. The decoy building was a nice touch, its blueprints had shown it to be full of high-tech security and expensive laser hallways and everything, but it appeared to be some kind of tradition for them to keep their ill-gotten goods in abandoned warehouses by docks. 

Michelangelo would have pointed this out, but it hadn't looked like anyone wanted to hear an attempt at humor in this case. He realized that he hadn't even paid attention to what it was the weapon was supposed to do when activated, even though he was sure that Donatello had done an hour-long presentation on the repercussions of it, whatever this mystical 'it' was. That, of course, was at some low point in his day, when he'd been trying to fight back the consequences of sleep deprivation and hoping no one noticed him using coffee as a sleep substitute.

He figured the thing was something appropriately horrible, considering who was using the weapon in question. Didn't really matter what it did, since they would naturally be stopping it from doing that...whatever it did.

The place itself was pretty far from where they lived: they traveled the sewer system a part of the way there, despite Raphael's complaints about the lack of efficiency. It was true, the pipes weren't supposed to be roads, built for people to get from one place to the other as quick as possible. They transported stuff that didn't need to get to Grand Central Station, so the pipes crossed chaotically and it was hard, at first, to tell which street they were under while they were traveling; they had to get attuned to knowing whether they were headed slightly lower, whether they were turning around in circles. After all of that, they may as well have had true North engraved in their brain tissue.

They climbed up to street level a few blocks before their final destination, since they planned on entering the place from the rooftops. He was behind Leonardo on their way up the narrow ladder rungs to the surface, and he tried very hard not to stare up too long as his brother pushed the manhole cover out of the way and stepped out.

Back in the day he would have complained about Leo's butt taking up the whole view, and now…Michelangelo found himself very grateful for the fact that, as turtles, they weren't capable of getting red in the face as he hauled himself up and refused to look at anyone for a few minutes, not wanting them to see his eyes.

No time for that on a mission, though, they made their way up the side of the nearest building with a decent amount of stealth and secrecy, and then waited for the mission plan as compiled and strategized by Leonardo. Michelangelo noticed that the night was very, very dark, the sky flat charcoal grey, which meant that clouds blocked up the night sky and blotted out the stars. Perfect weather for ninjas, even with the Manhattan nightlife adding more than enough light pollution to make everything visible.

The plan sounded simple. It sounded easy. But he knew those always ended up being the hardest ones.


	5. another one in the dark

**Growing Pains and Orange Bitters**

**Chapter Five:** _another one in the dark_

By: Serendipity

**Standard Disclaimer**: So, I still own nothing over here. Nothing of the Ninja Turtles, not even that Next Mutation stuff, and especially not the New Toon. Yes, indeed.

**Author's Note**: I love this chapter. It has action and fight scenes. And I hate this chapter. I hate it because of all the work I had to put through to get the situation exactly right. I swear to the great fanfic deity that this thing has suffered more revamps than April's personality, and that's really something, let me tell you. But I have triumphed, and here at last it is in all its glory.

* * *

They huddled inconspicuously in a corner of the roof, with Raphael watching through a skylight to see if any of the thugs below made any important moves. So far, the amassed enemy forces of the Purple Dragons were just sitting around, drinking, and generally looking very relaxed. Most likely they were secure in their pseudo-base's ability to thwart their attackers. This was understandable, since it would have actually worked if not for some chance incident the night before, with Raphael and Casey running into a couple of them bragging about their big, shiny weapon in the docks. They'd arranged for that small group to be otherwise engaged that evening. 

"What _is_ this secret weapon?" Michelangelo whispered in a dark undertone, "Does anyone else get flashbacks to An American Tail here? I mean, abandoned warehouse by the docks, utmost and complete secrecy about some weapon of doom, it's even New York City, for goodness sakes. I'm expecting a giant inflatable mouse of evil to come rushing out of those doors."

Leonardo gave him the look that meant that, while he found the comment amusing, he did not believe that Michelangelo was showing the behavior appropriate to the severity of the situation at hand. Donatello, however, let out a gratifying snort of amusement as he unpacked the various elements of his techno-genius from his duffle bag.

"Mikey, if you sing 'There Are No Purple Dragons in America', we're going to have to send you back home," he said, waving a suspicious-looking tool at him. Donatello had a lot of strange-looking tools. Although, aside from the typical hammers and screwdrivers and such you could find in any tool set, the other ones were pretty unfamiliar to him. It could be that he was just ignorant, but he was pretty much certain that his brother's affinity for strange mechanisms hearkened to a tendency towards mad scientist-dom.

Beside him, Raphael stiffened, his stance shifting from a careful crouch to a position that was all gathered muscles ready for a pounce. He lifted his _sai_ with the speed of a striking snake, and everyone on the rooftop moved quickly and unquestioningly into battle positions. Then he settled back into surveillance mode with a quick shake of his head, and the tension slowly edged away, leaving them all just a little more on guard for the brief scare.

"Look, let's just try to stay focused, all right?" Leonardo said in a hushed tone. Michelangelo wondered when, if ever, he was going to find new ways of saying the exact same thing. He was a obviously a hopeless Type A personality, completely fixated on the task at hand and thinking only of the planned strategy on how to get through it. Michelangelo stole a glance at Leonardo as he stood there, eyes narrowed and brow furrowed intensely as he looked down at the skylight window in front of him. Calling him a statue was more apt than he'd previously thought: it was the hard, distant perfection, the sense of larger-than-life he carried around, without Raphael's good-natured roughness that made it easier to relate. He looked definite, carved in stone. It struck him that he looked older with his expression full of anxious concentration, but then he'd always been 'older', even when they were all the same age. Now he seemed even more, far away and hard to touch, like he'd crumble away if Michelangelo let the slightest thought go astray.

"Mikey, is there something wrong?" Leonardo was looking at him, impatience melting into concern, and he tore his eyes away.

"Just getting antsy, man," he said lightly, "Feels like we've been on this rooftop all night." Like they'd be on the same rooftop going through the same routine forever.

It was strange how only half of them seemed to have settled back into the good old mission groove: there was Donnie tinkering around with his toys of science, Leonardo was standing there in his firm, solid, 'I am a rock' pose, lecturing about how everyone should be focused, alright, totally focused…but Raphael was silently efficient, keeping his attention on the gangsters in the building below them. Once upon a time, he would have been right up with them, making cracks and joking around even in the few nervous minutes before going head to head with the enemies. (Once upon a time being just a few weeks ago, but he figured he was allowed to exaggerate.) He'd have been twitching with the desire to bash some heads, old school. Now he looked, well, eager, but without a trace of the sarcastic humor he usually showed.

Before they left for their nightly campaign, Michelangelo had cornered his brother in his room and demanded an end to the sibling cold war. It had not gone well. Now both of them were steadfastly avoiding each other, making this night a very quiet one indeed.

Michelangelo knew in a kind of half-glimpsed nostalgia that he should have been having more fun with this mission, or at least offered more half-hearted complaints about its inherent lameness. Instead, he was sitting just about as far from the others as he could without being insulting or blaringly and blatantly obvious. This meant a stupid sort of tenuous crouch by Donnie's duffle bag, watching his brother go over the components of the more technological part of the plan. It was amazing, really, just looking at the jumble of wires and metal and knowing that somehow they made sense to him, a physical example of the mathematical figures that flitted across his computer screen like a different language.

"Everything ready?" Leonardo hissed. If he owned one he'd have been glancing at his watch.

Donatello nodded and fished around in his bag, pulling out one of the many strangely-shaped pieces of metal he had stashed in it. This one was definitely a new one, had that shiny 'just been made' look about it. It was octagonal in shape, palm-sized, and very smooth.

Michelangelo was nowhere near rocket science knowledge, but he could hazard a guess at what the mystery objects were, and he was fairly sure that they weren't bugs or cameras. This meant the other option was some kind of weapon, which left explosives. He'd started to gain a second sense for these things due to constantly being in the company of an unsettling number of explosion-happy scientists. He figured there must be something intrinsically seductive about the ability to set lots of things on fire.

"This is an explosive," Donatello said, clearing up all doubt. He handed it over to Leonardo, and Michelangelo stifled the urge to tell him to be careful, the thing could go off at any second.

Leonardo looked at it uncertainly; turning it over in his hands like it was a puzzle piece.

"It's very small," he said, finally.

Donatello looked mildly insulted at this criticism, but quickly got over it with a sigh. "Yeah," he agreed, 'It is pretty small, but the explosive itself will have quite impressive results. It took a while getting the right materials," he added, giving his device a look of proprietary pride. Michelangelo was familiar with just how long it took to nab some of the chemicals; he'd been there in the retrieval 'mission'. They'd gone and nabbed some from various company laboratories. As always, this felt strangely unethical until Donatello pointed out what they'd be using them for, anyway. At that point, well, they were both going to blow things up with the stuff; it was just that they would be using it to fight crime. Which was, of course, infinitely better.

Meanwhile, the bombs were being distributed to his brothers. Michelangelo really never wanted to think about how potentially dangerous it was to be walking around carrying a bag that could probably level a building. But then, he was always a little nervous around things that screamed 'look at me; I'm a ticket to an unknown death'.

"I'm giving you and Raph three each. Put them on the places I've indicated to you on your maps," Donatello said, pointing at the small grid replicas of the warehouse set up over the shell cell screens.

They tucked the things into the small compartments of their belts as Donatello tinkered efficiently with the main detonator. The screen flickered briefly before setting itself up into a series of digital numbers. Fifteen minutes.

The basic plan that they'd laid out was for Leonardo and Raphael to enter the warehouse and secretly plant the explosives. The weapon itself, (which turned out to look like one of those mounted ray gun deals with the ability to shoot beams of energy as wide as barrels) was a much too large to be carried out or even move, and everyone had come to the general agreement that blowing things up had been unfailingly effective in the past. They'd plant the explosives around the place in strategic points, and detonate them from a safe distance. The warehouse was mainly isolated, and they'd made sure that there would be no one around it when it blew. After the explosives were placed in their proper positions, they'd stage an attack on the warehouse and hopefully draw the Purple Dragons in the building out of range of the destruction.

While the other two below were arranging things, he and Donatello were designated look-outs, standing guard and making sure that they managed to set everything up without disruption. Then, when it was time for the game of Keep Away From About To Explode Warehouse, they'd come down and everything would go according to plan. It all had a very strategic, Risk-sounding ring to it, simple and clean. Maybe it was all in the way Leo put out the mission plans, direct and to-the-point, like nothing in the universe would dare interfere, even when everyone knew that the universe often begged to differ. Plans had a disturbing tendency to not translate well to reality.

Still, these guys were just Purple Dragons, and just a little over two dozen of them to boot. Even after the critical rehaul of the gang's competence, they weren't the most impressive opponents. A quick scan of the room told them that they had no weapons but common ones, handguns and pistols, pipes and chains. Nothing like Triceraton blasters among the lot of them. This was worrying, but after they'd checked out the place two days in a row and the security hadn't changed, it appeared as though the Dragons were doing them a big disservice in the underestimation department. That was all right by everyone. Meant getting home a lot faster for movie night.

Fifteen minutes would buy them enough time, after the gang left the warehouse, to escape from the estimated blast radius with some time to spare in cause difficulties arose. It still seemed short, as all countdowns inevitably did.

"Alright," Leonardo whispered, breaking the silence "Let's go in."

* * *

It was just an hour before it was time to head out, and everyone had been feeling those pregame jitters, those small moments before a fight when adrenaline levels had already been reached and everyone was on critical alert, but there was nothing to do but wait for the scheduled time. Plans were supposed to run like clockwork, but they were just flesh and blood and were therefore subject to things like boredom and irritation. They all dealt with that in different ways, of course: Donatello would constantly pack and unpack and sort through his duffle bag to make sure that everything was perfectly prepared. He'd pick up things absentmindedly, looking at this gadget or that, wondering if they could feasibly come in handy, and eventually end up over-packing and having to cut down right before departure. 

Leonardo had his own rendition of the 'always be prepared, that's the Boy Scout motto' shtick, but it didn't involve gadgetry. He would spend his time doing various tasks in an effort to feel like he was 'doing something'. It was like he felt that if he sat still or just read a book, it would be a sign of laziness. So, before missions, he often moved around the Lair, exercising or talking to Master Splinter, or sharpening his swords and checking through his gear.

He'd walk around and constantly check up on them to see if they were ready, reminding them of the time until eventually Raphael would get entirely sick of it and snap at him to go to the goddamn kitchen and drink some calming herbal tea. This ended up to be so ritualistic that by now, all Raph would have to say, barely looking up from the punching bag or training dummy, was "Herbal tea, Leo." The phrase became a new way of saying 'chill out.' Not that Michelangelo had used it much lately, since he was edgy enough to deserve his own beverage admonishment. _What would that be? Hot chocolate? Pepsi?_

Michelangelo didn't know or realize that he acted that much different during the high-energy stress-out sessions before missions, but the others liked to tell him that he got more obnoxious and 'clingy', asking them hundreds of questions and talking too quickly. Apparently the tension was the equivalent of a really bad sugar high. This didn't seem to have kicked in, because he'd felt listless and a little edgy all morning, even after he'd picked through his breakfast. His appetite had recently been going down the tubes, and so his energy was suffering the consequences. Most of the time, he felt too preoccupied to enjoy his old hobbies, and a dull and restless disinterest had settled in on him, keeping him idle.

The rhythmic sound of fists against leather told him that Raphael was pursuing his favorite time-killer: ritualistically beating the crap out of their equipment. It was his one and only method of dealing with anything, when he came to think about it. When Raph was preoccupied or worried about something, he fit in more practice hours. Not kata exercise or technique, like Leonardo's practice sessions, but brutal and effective punching, kicking, attacking inanimate objects with thoughts and emotions he'd found no other way to deal with. If he ever had a problem, he'd try to beat his way through it, and if it couldn't be solved with violence…well, then, that left them where they were right now: Michelangelo watching him from the doorway with the knowledge that Raphael knew very well he was there, and Raphael working intently on his personal medicine ball. Nothing to do but hold the impasse.

The others had gone to find some kind of wiring for Donatello, who needed a particular metal wire for this project. Master Splinter was tucked away in some ninjitsu-master wonderland, wherever ninja masters went when they astral-projected. This left him, for the first time, alone with Raphael, and he'd come to the probably suicidal decision to pull a Leo and confront him about his new avoidance program.

He'd practiced a nice script of points to bring up, but eventually threw it away because he knew it would all slip away when he actually stood face-to-face with his brother. Michelangelo tended to forget phrasing and eloquence and revert to stupid hand gestures and sound effects. It was his Thing.

The door was already partially open, as it almost always was. He'd grown convinced at some point that Raphael had either a mild case of claustrophobia, or he liked Klunk visiting him more than he liked to admit. Or maybe even both.

Sure enough, his pet was in residence, curled up on one of the training apparatus that Raphael kept about his room. Klunk looked up briefly as Michelangelo edged the door open a little bit, and the cat twitched his tail in greeting, his eyes greenly opalescent in the low lamplight. Raphael didn't break his rhythm as he alternately punched and kicked the hanging punching back, keeping the same pattern.

_left fist, right fist, kick with the left, right fist,__ left fist, kick with the right_

His brother didn't look up when he walked into the room, but the sudden tension in his shoulders told him that he knew he was there. The leather bag shook with the force of his next punch, tapped against the wall, and swung quickly back again as the barrage of blows continued. The next kick swung and spun it on its cable, twisting in mid-air. It was probably meant to be intimidating, a silent order not to come near. Michelangelo had been pretty inoculated against the fear of brotherly violence for years, so the threat wasn't as scary as it could have been. Not that being threatened with imminent bodily harm or at least a swift kick out the door was thrilling.

Michelangelo lingered there for a few seconds, just a few feet away from his brother and his isolated little world that seemed to involve him, the punching bag, and whatever imaginings were being conjured up by his training.

Suddenly the pattern of alternating blows came to an abrupt halt, punctuated by one last attack at the base of the punching bag. Raphael turned to face him without a second glance at the equipment, his expression set into a look of careless apathy. The bag swung crazily on its chain behind him as he walked closer to Michelangelo.

"Time to go yet?" he asked gruffly, grabbing one of his scruffy towels from a crate on the floor, "Give me a second to grab my stuff." His sai were sitting neatly on the shelf that lined his wall, looking nonfunctional and decorative as matching vases. Weapons generally did not look dangerous unless they were wielded.

"Nah, it's still a while before we gotta go," Michelangelo said, trying to find an unoccupied piece of wall to lean against nonchalantly, "I just wanted to talk. Y'know, talk. That thing we do with our mouths and the words and stuff. Talking. It's fun," he added desperately.

Raphael looked at him warily. "Talking," he said, giving the word the same connotations as 'cleaning the toilets' or 'performing ritualistic hamster genocide'. "_Talking_," he continued, as if he really hadn't heard him right the first time and was checking just to make sure.

Michelangelo didn't really see why this was such a shocking choice in leisure activity. Communication was a very important thing, especially when it went completely quiet and dead to the point of insanity. He couldn't, _couldn't _talk to Leonardo anymore; he could barely keep himself from focusing on him when he wasn't in the room. Donatello was cool to hang out with, but he was always so busy with his various projects that most of the time, he was distracted and irritated with disruptions, and he didn't really have an out-of-family buddy like Casey to hang out with. Acquaintances, yes, playmates, yes, but not that close, best-buds connection he had with Raph.

Once in a while, he used to go see April and bother her about their mutual love of Monty Python and the Three Stooges, but that had all gone quiet after the last phone call she'd made to him. He was tired of all the silence now, he needed to have Raphael back and hanging out with him, being crazy and hyper and fun with him again. He needed as much normalcy in his life as he could get.

"Yeah," he answered Raphael's question, nodding like a moron. "Talking. Actually, that's just the start of the wonderful world of hanging out. We have talking, and then we have video games, and if we really feel up to a lot of excitement, we have dogfights on the floor. We have a whole hour to do this, I should point out," he said, hoping that he was firmly enough in front of the only exit, "But, yes. There is that talking thing again."

Raphael let out a belabored sigh and turned back to the shelf, tossing the towel on it as Michelangelo waited for him to start up on this novel concept. It was clear, after a few minutes, that he had no intention of doing any such thing. He turned back to the medicine bag, still swinging faintly, as if blown by a mild breeze, and set himself back into a fighting stance. "You drag me away from practice to _talk_?" he finally said, shaking his head in disbelief, "You coming down with something?" Without waiting for a response, he went back at his routine.

_left__ fist, right fist, kick with the left, right fist, left fist, kick with the right_

Out of the corner of his eye, Michelangelo noticed Klunk unfolding himself from his perch. The cat stretched in that lazy, sinuous, cat way and made his way towards them, paws making no sound as they padded on the floor. Just as Michelangelo thought he would try to leap on him like he did when he wanted held and fussed over, Klunk stopped and watched the bag jostle against the wall, tip of his tail flicking in curiosity at the sight, eyes following each blurred movement, just like it was a mouse or a moth.

"Go play one of your games if you're bored, Mikey," his brother said, "Y'know, that starship thing."

The 'starship thing' was weeks old and untouched, still lying in his room in its wrapper, gathering dust. Michelangelo wasn't playing much lately. He didn't feel as though he should bring that up.

* * *

Leonardo and Raphael slipped into the shadows and out of sight, disappearing into their element as easily as a swimmer submerging in water. He managed a brief glimpse of Leonardo's bandanna tail, a quick flutter of bright color in the darkness, and then they were gone, and he was left alone in his post. They'd assigned him to the rooftop, Donatello on the streets, hidden away in the battleshell, where he could check up on them with his cameras and deal with the detonation in a secure place. This left Michelangelo on the roof for surveillance, where he was supposed to be routinely prowling the perimeter and checking for any signs of trouble. 

_'And when trouble arrives'_, Leonardo had told him, saying 'when' and not 'if' because the course of crime-fighting never did run smooth, _'Do not engage it by yourself. Call Donnie and he will alert us to it. Do not alert anyone to our presence. That means be careful, Mikey, and focus for once.'_ Those last words hinted at the many times in previous missions where his tendency to become distracted had brought down some kind of danger upon everyone's heads, summoning ghosts of old guilt. So he paid very close attention to his brother and cut away any other thoughts when he spoke, trying very carefully to be good enough.

Alone on the rooftop, it was harder to concentrate. It was horribly quiet for the outskirts of a densely-populated city, the faded background noise of traffic and various other New York night scene sounds in the distance, diminished enough to sound like television static. People were supposed to gain advanced concentration skills in total still and silence, but he'd always done better with some nice music playing in the background or with conversations humming around him, sounds that let him know that he was not entirely alone. Silence just made him jittery and over-imaginative, sending his brain down unhelpful lines of speculation, bringing back horror movie plots and old memories of previous battles.

Michelangelo stopped at the side of the building and peered out. There was a definite lack of action going on there, unless one counted the alley cat scavenging for the decaying remains of a recent fish market. The gross-out factor there was pretty high, but the danger levels seemed to be at a nice flatline.

The earpiece fixed to his headset fizzed and Donatello's voice came over, low and hushed. "Do you see anything?"

"Nada, dude," he replied, adjusting his microphone as he spoke, "Unless we're getting attacked by the Sewer Rat and Alley Cat Coalition, everything's clear right now. You?"

"Nothing problematic is coming up on my scanner."

"Cool," Michelangelo said, ending the brief conversation there. There wasn't time for more, despite his desire to have a nice, sane conversation while their other two brothers were busy planting bombs in the building below his feet. Also, Leonardo had told him to pay attention. He knew he'd been on edge about the relatively quick and painless way everything had fallen together, the simplicity of the plan made him nervous. Leonardo didn't believe there was such a thing about being too careful, and even though Michelangelo joined in when Raphael teased him about it, he could kind of see where he was coming from with it. They'd been ambushed too many times to completely take it easy.

The back of the building was clear, free of any shadowed figures whispering with guns in the dark. There was a line of cars, each of them a smoothly polished black, gleaming in the dark, and he had to really bite down on the urge to go down and slash all the tires or at least soap funny messages in the windows. The river was a strange, moving shape in the moonlight, fluid and eerie and almost mysterious without the bright sunlight to reveal the cans and soda bottles and other various pollution. After a few more moments free of any disturbances, Michelangelo returned to prowling around the perimeter of the building.

Walking required too much muscle memory and not enough brainwork. Usually he was all for tasks that didn't require too much in the thought department, since he was humongously lazy and usually quite happy with that. It was just that having nothing to do made him zone out and daydream, which was bad for business all around. At first, he tried to focus on certain points around the building, but as even that became a pattern, he started to get restless. With nothing to do that would engage his mind, it went idle and he slipped more into his own thoughts with every uneventful step.

He used to daydream happily about things like becoming a wrestler with Raph, or going superhero full time and how he would save the day with many feats of adventure and daring. He still thought of that sometimes, but with things so different now, he'd think of other subjects. Not just about himself and his own problems, but about the others, and what they were going through, if they went through anything at all. After all, they were all supposed to be the same age, even if he'd folded himself neatly into the category of 'kid brother'. No one called him that, but it was still there, hanging in the air like subtitles in a foreign film. He was the one that wasn't supposed to be growing up, and here he was now, with all of _this_ hanging on him.

The point there was that this was all supposed to be normal. At least, everything but the Leonardo part of it was supposed to be normal. All the discomfort, and the dreaming, and the feeling that he wasn't what he'd been before and wouldn't be again. Like making iron into steel, you couldn't reverse the process or send everything back to the beginning.

Was he the first one to go through it all? Shouldn't it have been Leonardo, who was supposed to be the oldest and most mature or something? Why start all of it with him, when he couldn't very likely ask for help, or why couldn't it have been all of them at once? At least he'd have that. They'd all hurt and get confused and embarrassed together, like they'd trained and learned together when they were little. It was meant to be that way, wasn't it? He felt that it was wrong to leave him growing alone.

Or maybe they'd all gone through it years ago and thought he still had to catch up, maybe that was why no one noticed it or talked to him about it, even though he felt neon-sign obvious, like he was walking around with a sign that screamed 'puberty'. Michelangelo hated that word now. It spoke of strangeness and people growing apart, of unfamiliarity and change. He used to know what he was.

_But this is so _stupid_. So totally stupid, obsessing over stuff I can't even help. I never used to do this. This is Leo and Raph territory. You're supposed to be different, __Mikester Man__; you've got that fun, future-minded viewpoint. What happened to that?__ You remember that?_

The problem was that every time he tried moving on or ignoring the subject, it kept popping up. There was no hiding a problem when it lived with you. Or when really, it _was_ you.

_Fine, then go ahead and talk to someone._

_Because that worked out really well the last time. _

_There's got to be something to do. You can't just do _nothing.

_Well what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to _do?

"Shut _up_," he growled at himself. All options so far seemed impossible. The whole situation was impossible. Nothing to do but sit it out and hope it eventually died.

The earpiece suddenly crackled to life, startling him out of his thoughts. "Mikey. Mikey, have you heard anything from them?"

"What?" he asked blankly, staring out at the cityscape in front of him before focusing back on the problem at hand. "No, no one's dropped me a line. Were they supposed to?"

Donatello was silent for a few seconds.

"They've been in there too long. Something's gone wrong."

* * *

"This is one of those big, complicated self payback things, isn't it?" Michelangelo demanded of Raphael's back. "Like the time you almost broke my leg when we were seven and you wouldn't play with me for a week after that. I remember you hated playing leapfrog ninja with Leo, but you kept doing it, even though he pissed you off with his rule-lawyering. Didn't understand that roughhousing is the best part of the game." 

It struck him, suddenly, as he stood there trying to face his brother's constantly fluctuating moods, that his problem was that he didn't know how to play chess. Donatello liked the game, and he liked to watch him play it like he generally liked to watch his brother as he solved intricate puzzles and problem-solved, but he didn't have any interest in the game for what it was. He liked games, usually, but there was something bare and stark and mathematical about the way chess was set up. It was like someone stripped away all of the spare features and colors and sparkle of video games and laid it out as the bare bones, pure strategy.

Michelangelo had always been interested in how easily people were relegated to chess roles in movies or books, how simply situations slipped in. For a little while, he'd thought maybe people who played chess knew more about how to get through things: not just fighting and strategy, but everyday situations, too. He'd wondered if Donatello kind of saw the world like that: stripped of anything but mathematics and pure, basic interactions. Michelangelo had never asked him about it, though.

Now he felt like one of those little pieces, the pawns, trying to move against a bigger piece. He felt that maybe there could be a good way to do this; he just couldn't figure it out. So, he had to revert to his usual tactic: just say whatever he felt and hope that something stuck.

"Well, just stop it, okay?" he tried, "You're doing that moody hang out by yourself and mood and stuff thing, and it's not good for you."

"Look, I'm just tryin' to exercise here," Raphael said, that hasty, gruff edge in his voice that meant that he didn't want to talk, "No one's getting weird around here but you, okay? You're the one who stays half the days locked up in your room, so don't get pissed if I don't swing by to talk to you about whatever it is you're doing there. 'Scuse me for thinking you wanted to be all alone with yourself!"

Michelangelo was momentarily caught off balance before he went back and remembered that Raphael hadn't been his standoffish self before the whole coming out incident. "I'm not being weird, Raph!" he said finally, stumbling over words, "And that's not it, either! You haven't talked to me since Casey came over! And what was up with that thing in practice, anyway? You never just give up when you're fighting me! Are you saying that's not being weird? What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing!" Raphael punched the medicine bag at the same time he spoke, his voice coming out in a choked out almost-yell. "Shut up, Mikey, if you're just going to come in here and talk like a moron!"

He took a few angry steps forward, just in arm's reach of his brother, "_I'm_ talking like a moron now? You know, you can't do this, man. It's not cool. You don't get to get me mad and then act like you're the one who should be mad at me, okay? You guys pushed me, so what? We all get angry at each other! It's not like the end of the world!"

Raphael swung around and struck out, pushing him with the flat of his hand so he fell hard on his bottom on the floor. He instinctively brought his hands up in a defensive block, awaiting the next swing, but Raphael just stood where he was with an expression that looked like he'd just been slugged hard in the back of the head.

"Yeah, we all get angry," he said, his breathing catching raggedly and making his brother's voice sound harsher than usual, "But it don't usually end up with gettin' kicked down the stairs, Mikey!"

Michelangelo rolled easily back to his feet, feeling his own temper spike up. Normally it wouldn't be this quick to rise, but with the little sleep he'd had lately, all of his emotions were raw and easily exposed, just beneath the surface of calm. Normally he'd have noticed the pleading note beneath Raphael's angry accusation, and would have tried to understand. All he felt, though, was his own irritation with the brother who seemed hell-bent to push him away when he needed to make peace.

"Pot and KETTLE, Raph," he growled at him, "You're the one who usually goes all beat-down mode on the rest of us, but I can't do it when you get me mad? I get mad, too, you know! What makes that any different from you? You're the only one allowed to do it now?"

"_Yes_!" Raphael roared at him, and shoved one of his shelves down, sending it crashing to the floor, scattering tools in a shining clatter of wreckage. Klunk let out an offended yowl and fled.

Michelangelo just stared at him dumbly.

Raphael growled, running his hands over his head in a gesture of frustration. "Yes!" he said, waving a hand furiously, "You're not supposed to be the one blowin' up like that, don't you get it? I'm supposed to be the one with the problems, and you're…you can't be doing that. Not like me."

"But. Raph…" he started, not knowing how he could continue. "I…just…"

His brother slammed his fist against the wall, cracking stone. "Shut up! Y'just…you don't get it!" Raphael glared at him, shoulders rising and falling as he obviously restrained himself from going into a rage. He snorted in disgust as Michelangelo just gaped at him, unable to make a sound. "Just get out! I got a mess to clean up now," he ground out, and kicked at a wrench.

It slid, making a slithery, metallic sound, and Michelangelo backed up, slowly, to the door.

He hit a solid body on the way out and turned to see Leonardo looking at him with his face a picture of too many emotions warring themselves, understanding and disapproval and a trace, maybe, of something satisfied and at the same time empathetic. Michelangelo wondered how long he'd been there.

"You heard," he said, not needing to make it a question.

"It's time to get ready," Leonardo said, unfolding his arms and turning to go. Michelangelo watched his back as he walked away, and tried very hard to get over it.

* * *

"Crap, crap, crapola," he muttered at the skylight that refused to open, "Donnie, it's blocked. I can't see them; they're probably on the other side of the building. Those windows were soaped over." He was nervous, his hands were shaking and the quaver in his voice betrayed him. "I'm gonna have to go in after them. I'm…I'm going to try the loading area in the back, okay? That should be okay." 

"Should I come?" Donatello asked, in a tone that meant he was trying to be levelheaded despite his own concerns, "You shouldn't go in alone."

Michelangelo paused on the side of the roof, his hand scraping against rough brick as his thoughts raced. He wasn't much of a planner, not like Leonardo. He was good at thinking on his feet, he was good at making quick strategies in the heat of battle, but that wasn't the same as the calculated efforts of Leonardo and Donatello, and he knew it. It was funny that Donnie was asking him for advice, when he was the one who was supposed to be the planner. It showed how nervous he was. "No, dude. Stay in the battleshell," he said at last. "Leo said it's safer in there and you need to carry the switch, yeah? Don't want that accidentally getting triggered."

A moment of silence from the earpiece, then a short, static-filled sigh. "Yeah, you're right. Use the alarm device on your cell to contact me in ten minutes. If not, I'll come in, too." He sounded frustrated about this, and Michelangelo couldn't blame him. He'd also spend harried minutes and hours waiting while he didn't know whether his brothers were losing or winning a fight.

He didn't like the whole concept of coming in without any back-up, either, but he also didn't like the idea of accidentally blowing up. Donatello was obviously unhappy with waiting while everyone could be in a life-threatening situation, but hopefully, and this was pray-to-God hope, he could somehow get the whole mission running back in order so their last back-up wouldn't have to come running over.

Also, there was the point that if Michelangelo got into trouble as well, the odds weren't too likely on Donatello managing to get everyone out in one piece. The thought made him stop short, wondering if it would be better to have someone else: someone backing him up would be helpful if there was an ambush waiting for him, or what if there was some kind of technological problem that his brother could solve? What if a bomb needed defused? What if? His thoughts jangled together frantically, guessing and second-guessing, before he tried to wave all of that aside to concentrate on the plan at hand.

Michelangelo scaled down the side of the building with little difficulty and came to a rest behind the shelter of two giant, dark green dumpsters. The delivery area was illuminated solely by a light set into the wall between the two metal doors, and he could see a couple guards idly lazing against the wall, smoke from their cigarettes trailing off into the night, the orange-lit ends moving slightly as they spoke to each other. He was in a hurry, hasty to get inside and not feeling overly-cautious when the only people in view were two thugs, with guns or without, so he crept just a bit closer and drew out his nunchucks. They slid soundlessly from his belt and he twitched his wrist, preparing to spin the weapons.

Then one of the men made a wide gesture with the hand holding the cigarette, bringing the faint red gleam into a wide arc, and the tiny motion of light revealed something that made Michelangelo come to a halt.

Foot ninja. Hiding as only ninja could, almost effortlessly blending into the shadows of the docking area. One of them had moved, only very slightly, as the light swung towards them. Just enough for him to catch that movement.

"_Crap_," he muttered, backing up as hastily as he could without compromising his stealth. "Crap, crap, _damn_. Total and absolute _damn. _Damnamundo. Damn on _toast_."

Now that he was looking for them, the human figures slowly emerged like patterns from an optical illusion: shapes of arms and legs and the occasional glint of their weapons. At least ten of them that he could see, and there were definitely some he couldn't. He wasn't as good as Leonardo at being observant and spotting movements in the darkness, and he definitely couldn't do his trick of actually sensing presences without the aid of vision at all. Right then, squatting in the tenuous shelter of the trash cans, it seemed like a really useful trick to try to pick up.

He crept back a little more and ran over his options. There was no way he could simply sneak past those guards like he'd intended to before, and the previous idea of just knocking them out and slipping in wouldn't work, either. Not with at least a dozen ninja glaring down at him from the shadows like humanoid gargoyles. A plain out frontal attack was Right Out. Smoke pellets would give him cover, but would also alert every enemy out there to his presence, and if they had captured Leonardo and Raphael, they might move them, or do something to them, or even maybe kill them. His mind skittered hastily away from that idea, they couldn't be dead or in trouble that he couldn't get them out of, not when he had so much unsolved. Not when he and Raph still weren't speaking. There wasn't any way the Powers That Be would yank anyone away under those circumstances, because it was so achingly Not Fair.

He was so tired his head ached and would not let him think.

His hands were shaking and he swallowed; running back to his ideas. When it came down for him to plan, he tried to take the path directly in front of him. Too bad the path ahead was littered with ninja death traps. So much for that idea.

Michelangelo ended up going straight back up the wall. They hadn't placed any Foot troops on the roof, but he didn't want to think about why that was. There were smaller windows that were part of a second floor that wasn't their main objective. None of them had bothered with touching that part of the building, since the floor was like an attic/loft area originally designed for more storage, and their great weapon of power was explicitly located in the main, open space of the warehouse itself. Now he slipped over the side of the wall, inspecting the windows that would hopefully be his ticket in. They'd been boarded over long ago and by cheap labor: the wood was soft and dry; rotting from the constant exposure to the damp air sent up by the river, the nails rusted. All it took was a nice push before a good section of the boards snapped open.

He tumbled into the room in a neat roll, barely touching the floor and landing softly on the balls of his feet. The room was empty, the floorboards felt like the sort that would creak at the slightest wrong move, and there were disgusting globs of cobwebbing everywhere, but he was in.

Michelangelo pressed the button on his shell cell, signifying that he'd entered the building, and navigated the room as lightly as he could, careful not to stay too long on the floorboards. The upper section looked like a collection of small offices, filled with metal chairs and old desks, and he wondered what the place had been previously used as before it was seized to hide contraband. Then he was at a sudden turn in the hall and he glimpsed a wide, iron stairway with a parapet wrapping around the warehouse, bright light touching everything and making it obvious, stark and poor for concealment, and his mind tossed angry curses at the anti-ninja defenses before he made his way ahead.

Voices echoed up from below him when he leaned over the side of the railing, but something was odd about the way the Purple Dragons were talking. He bent his head down and spotted a few of the in a cluster, speaking in hushed tones over some dark shape they had near the wall. Some words filtered up to him, enough for him to get the gist of what they were saying: something about capturing the turtles and Master Hun being pleased, but they always went on about that. He chalked it up as completely unimportant. Then they moved away and the shape became Leo, trapped in ropes, his weapons lying out of reach.

His brother was bleeding.

* * *

When he was twelve, he remembered swinging out with a broken _bokuto, _upset that Leo had cracked a piece off of it and impatient with sword exercises in general, and tripping and flailing, and the jagged wooden sword tip slashed out and he felt it tear into the skin above his brother's plastron and catch. He remembered being twelve and watching blood run through his brother's fingers in rivulets and Leo saying that it was an accident, there was wood polish on the floor, that Michelangelo must have slipped. He remembered seeing the skin cleaned, the cut open and raw, and remembered sobbing apologies into his pillow. 

Even after too many injuries and battles to count, he hated seeing Leonardo bleeding, and he never went out of his way to work with bladed weapons.

It wasn't as bad as it looked, he saw that right away. There was quite a bit of blood, but that was normal for a head wound. The marks of blood on the floor just looked worse than it was because he'd been dragged a short distance across, smearing it out in a wide arc. Aside from the gash across his eye ridge, he was badly bruised, the back of his head was purpling and swollen, and something that was probably a knife or dagger wound jaggedly stood out on his shoulder. Leonardo was lying very still, and his mouth was tight and white-lipped.

Protective anger poured through him, but Michelangelo didn't dare move from his position: he was nearly flattened against the only cover he could find. The building was old and oddly shaped; it had probably gone through many different incarnations and purposes. Instead of being neatly rectangular, there were odd corners and edges here and there that indicated an original structure that had previously held multiple rooms. He was squeezed into one of those corners, crouched close to the floor.

The Dragons had dragged Leonardo against the wall with little ceremony and then had left, paying him no attention now that they believed their enemy immobile and trapped. They moved quietly and efficiently, something that poked at him like a pin as a sign of incongruity. Michelangelo ignored it in favor of the more important issue.

His brother was bound so that he was lying uncomfortably on his side, his arms wrapped around his legs and his hands tied together tightly with rope. His legs were bound at the ankle, and to make it even safer, they'd tied his arms _to_ his legs, at the calves. His mouth was covered with a long strip of duct tape. Kind of cheap, but effective.

Leonardo was conscious: he could tell that much just by looking at him. He wasn't facing him, but his muscles were taut, his whole body tense, even though he wasn't actively struggling against the ropes. He shifted and Michelangelo winced as he saw the tightly-wound rope cut into him, making the skin nearest to the bonds go pale. It looked like he was testing the strength of the ropes, calculated any escape options open to him. Suddenly he slumped and made a low, moaning sound deep in his throat, causing a brief shudder to go through Michelangelo that jolted from his throat straight down to the pit of his stomach. He could have choked. _Sick, damn you, you're sick._

After checking for any onlookers he moved cautiously towards his brother, taking care to be as quiet as possible. Twenty-four Purple Dragons were still a lot for one fighter to take on, and for some reason, they'd managed to take down his two brothers without causing enough noise to alert him to a fight. Then there was the sense of something very off about this batch of street thugs: the way they moved was all wrong. There was a sense of grace in their movements that hadn't been present in any other gang member he'd met. There was coordination there, where Purple Dragons usually swaggered and staggered, using pure muscle. The knot-work used on his brother wasn't amateurish. They were tight, secure, and perfectly vicious.

All of this lent to his desire for total stealth mode as he tried to remove the tape from Leonardo's mouth with as much delicacy as was practical.

When the duct tape was removed, Leonardo looked at him, his eyes sharp and clear and penetrative as they usually were right before he decided that a mission had become more serious and therefore needed heavy duty attention. Michelangelo brought out a _kunai_ and sliced through the ropes, jerking the broken ends away with a rough gesture.

"The Dragons are ninjas," Leonardo said right off the bat, that air of self-recrimination in his tone. "I should have known, they're too nimble and they move like they're trained- well, they're calling someone now. They're calling Hun. Mikey, and they…I think they got Raph even worse, he was in first. He came in on the other side, in case there was a trap." He gave a dark sort of chuckle. "Well, there was. There's no weapon. It was all a set-up. The rest of them are out looking for you guys now."

Michelangelo thought of Donatello, waiting in the battle shell, and felt his pulse go faster.

The katana were lying a few feet away from them, gleaming coldly. Leonardo flicked a glance over to them and slid his gaze back to Michelangelo. "When I get up, they're going to rush me. They took the supplies we had in our belts, so they have the bombs gathered together over there," he indicated a raised platform with a brief nod of his head, "It might not work as we planned, but this building is very old. It should go down. They don't have any weapons here, but the explosions will distract them enough for us to leave in the chaos. It will attract the police and the fire department, and that means that they'll have to clear out.'

He explained this in the sort of detached voice he used when he went over strategy, like he didn't want to think of what he was doing too hard."When I get up," he repeated, "They're going to rush me. You take advantage of that and get to Raph, and take care of him. I'll call Donnie and tell him we're on our way."

The Purple Dragon ninjas-in-disguise were milling around in a celebratory manner, some of them talking in raised voices, probably boasting about capturing them, planning what they would do once Hun drove over to join the party. Michelangelo's stomach turned over. "Yeah, okay," he said.

Leonardo looked at him with his clear, perceptive eyes and slowly smiled. It looked a little forced, but otherwise okay. "And don't go looking for giant weasels," he instructed.

For a while, Michelangelo just stared at him, convinced it was apparent that head trauma had driven his brother completely insane. Then he remembered his joke right before this new mess started, and managed a short laugh. "Mice, dude," he said, "Giant, inflatable mice. Get your movie trivia straight.' He pulled out his nunchucks and shrunk back into his corner, waiting for Leo to make his move.

"Who shows you these movies?" he heard Leonardo mutter, and then the dull murmur of background conversation broke up into shouts and rushed footsteps, and he heard his brother's swords clink against the floor as they were drawn, and then there was nothing but the chaotic sounds of a fight: the clash of steel, cries at injuries or cries of rage, and the dull, meaty sound as punches met their marks.

He pulled himself back onto the parapet and had enough time to spot Raphael's prone body slumped against the raised platform before a few of the Foot below him spotted him and started making their way up the staircase, leaping over the steps two by two to get at him as quickly as possible. Michelangelo raced down the narrow iron path and felt it tremble with each footstep. He felt himself worrying with each wobble about the quality of the workmanship. This became less of a pressing issue when he noticed that the remaining ninja surrounding his brother had hauled him up and were very definitely trying to drag him off towards the huge vehicular metal doors in the back.

Someone grabbed him by the arm; he turned blindly and kicked out, knocking one of his assailants over the railing and onto the hard floor below with a loud, emphatic crack. The angle of his neck told him that at least one of them wouldn't be attacking him again.

More of them were pressing in now, surrounding and flanking him. Then, they began to make their attacks with such calculated and concentrated ferocity that he began to have a hard time holding up under the assault. It would have taken someone with even better coordination than his to defeat all of them together, and his brother was facing the same odds a floor below him. No one would be coming to help.

He went down under the consistent beating, his arms pressed against the hard metal of the floor as they kicked unsuccessfully at his shell. The pain of blows to the shell was dull, a brief ache rather than the sharp pain of flesh wounds, and he tried to gather his thoughts under the barrage.

He saw the fight below as a sequence of scattered images: Leonardo lost a sword to his opponent; the blade was flung from his hand and landed point-first in a wall, shivering on impact. Raphael's feet dragged limply on the floor, the doors screeched as they were opened. Someone's boot struck him in the head hard enough to knock it against the iron floor, sending stars exploding into his vision as he watched Leonardo go down, two men dragging him to the floor by his arms. He hung there, clutching the iron railing, time stretching out like taffy in the strange slow motion of adrenaline-drenched thought, and watched Raphael's feet slowly leave his range of sight, watched Leonardo disappear under a small mob of moving bodies, like a monster made of human parts..

Then he grabbed an ankle and twisted, knocking the man down against the others and he was up again, nunchucks spinning in a flurry of action until his attackers went down. He took advantage of the moment and leapt over the railing, executing a neat flip and landing on his feet at the bottom.

Raphael was nearly at the door, the people carrying him had stopped to wait for something just beyond the threshold. He sped towards them, nunchucks spinning furiously as he charged.

There were three men with his brother. Michelangelo counted them as each went down; he aimed for head shots to knock them out long enough that they wouldn't cause trouble. His opponents were armed, but none of them had swords or visibly ninja weapons, part of their disguised as Purple Dragons. They had knives, chains, daggers, and the occasional hidden tanto. The shorter-range weapons gave him an advantage.

One of their daggers brushed against the skin between his shell and plastron, slicing into his side. Another managed to nick his neck in an attempt to slit his throat, and he shuddered and kicked the man away with enough force to send him flying against the wall. He heard bones break as he slid down to the floor, but then there was another enemy trying to engage him in combat, and that required immediate attention. Fighting was like breathing now, engaging pieces of his mind that were more like instinct and reaction rather than rational thought. He _felt_ the attacks coming, and _felt_ what was the right way to counter them.

_One_. A man fell when he struck him again, shoulder, head, chest, and hit the floor.

_Two_. The woman with the chain, he disarmed her and concentrated blows on her back and once to the back of her head. She slumped to the floor, collapsing like he'd cut invisible strings.

_Three_. One last one, and he just flipped him over his head after he'd attempted to leap at him, flinging him far away.

Then finally they were down, and he grabbed a knife from the floor to cut away Raphael's bonds, freeing his hands and arms. He dropped the knife down next to his brother and spun around again, standing over him and searching for the next attack. There wasn't time to completely cut him loose: once his hands were free, Raph could easily untie himself. Michelangelo had to worry about the swarm of angry ninja headed for them, weapons out at the ready and obviously prepared to inflict serious damage.

Behind them, he saw Leonardo had somehow taken his swords back and had managed to get out under the mob of enemies. The ones who'd been fighting him were scattered around on the floor, unconscious or too wounded to stand. Leonardo was just standing near the wall, fiddling with something in his hand, and Michelangelo squinted at it and finally recognized the object as a shell cell. He was dialing something quickly and furtively, probably Donatello to tell him they were headed out.

Michelangelo felt a burst of relief because thank god, he was finally calling Donnie and that meant they could just run away soon and all of this humongous mess could finally be over with, they could go home and watch movies the rest of the night and maybe all of this action would leave him too exhausted to dream.

He held that happy image in his head for about five seconds, and then one of the supposed-to-be-unconscious ninjas rose silently to their feet and drew a tanto blade.

Leonardo didn't seem to notice as the enemy positioned it into an overhead strike, aimed for the back of the neck. He kicked him viciously in the back of the knees and Leonardo fell forward, unbalanced, knocking the shell cell out of his hands so it clattered across the floor. The mini-screen stayed on for a second, a tiny patch of bright blue, before fading right to black. Then the man's leg was on Leo's shell and he was aiming the sword thrust downwards.

His stomach clenched in sudden panic and he ran, leapt, _flew_ without thinking about anything but Leonardo couldn't die, he wasn't allowed to just _die, _not when he still hadn't talked to him properly for weeks and when he hadn't fixed anything yet. Thoughts of anything else disappeared at that moment: Raphael behind him, still partially tied up and in poor condition to fight, Donatello in the truck, anything but the fact that Leonardo was on the ground and in trouble was washed away.

When he was close enough for a projectile weapon to hit, he dug out his kunai again and aimed. With perfect accuracy, he flung the blade straight into the man's hand, causing him to drop the weapon in his shock and pain.

Leonardo took that moment to flip around and leap up, drop kicking the man to the floor. He was breathing harshly, probably because the man had been compressing his ribcage against the concrete, and Michelangelo fished the shell cell up from the floor for him. That was about all he had time to do before they were attacked again, and then there was nothing to think of but fighting, and living, and protecting each other long enough to make an escape.

* * *

The fight did not go in their favor at all. Leonardo ended up grabbing him while he was being flung by one of the ninjas and they both crashed straight through one of the enormous glass windows and into the darkness of the alley, scraped and cut, but in the safe concealment of all the shadows a poorly-lit dock had to offer. This was all apparently part of Leonardo's plan: get flung through a pane of glass, land outside the building, safely escape. 'Safe' being the operative word that wasn't bothering to operate. 

Leonardo rolled to his feet and swiftly made his way down one of the twisting alleys."Hurry up," he said, "They'll follow us soon."

"I have glass in my arms," he said angrily, not expecting to be answered, and then followed his brother through the narrow alleyways to the place where the battleshell was. The door hastily opened and they slipped inside, and Donatello leaned over the side of the driver's seat worriedly.

"I triggered the detonation when I saw you coming," he said in a hurried tone, "We need to get going now, because when it blows, it's going to be huge. Also, there are an awful lot of Foot skulking around…I saw them on the scans I was making of the surrounding area. They still show up on infra…" then he paused, looking at them very oddly. "Where's Raph?" he asked.

Michelangelo's heart plummeted to his stomach and froze.


	6. every now and then i fall apart

**Growing Pains and Orange Bitters**

**Chapter Six:** _every now and then I fall apart_

By: Serendipity

**Standard Disclaimer**: It occurs to me that I don't necessarily need one of these in every chapter. I mean, I might, who knows, someone may look at my last chapter first and become struck with horror that I do not state that I own no part of the Ninja Turtles. This could happen. But as this is unlikely, consider this the last disclaimer. I'm turning rebel!

**Author's Note**: With NaNo working me over, this chapter was written pretty slowly. Sorry about the wait to everyone reading the story, but the novel-writing muse beckoned me with her silvery tones and I drifted over. Meanwhile, we're just about nearing the end in this story here, or so I've led myself to believe. Or maybe some kind of penultimate thing, anyway.

* * *

Leonardo spun angrily around to face him, lips curling into a snarl. "You left him behind?"

Behind him, the red numerals on Donatello's miniature doomsday device were ticking away seconds, illustrating what little time they had to actually discuss this. Somewhere, in the ruins of their mission and in the heat of all the action, he'd simply…forgotten. And now Raphael was out there, possibly still bound and in possession of their enemies, ready to be wiped from existence by one of his own brother's bombs because of another brother's mistake. Because of his lack of focus, or because he had been distracted by Leonardo in danger.

His mind raced. Had he really been in that much danger? As much as Raphael, tied up on the ground and surrounded by the enemy? Leonardo could easily sense flung weapons without having to see them. He could have caught the blow on his sword, could have flung the man off his shell and taken care of himself. Was it really necessary to have run over? His thoughts collided into each other, doubting, repeating the events.

Michelangelo let his mouth open on its own accord, time oozing molasses-slow like it often did when he was panicked. He didn't know what he could have said, but was keenly aware that he could, _should _say something. Anything to explain himself, or no, that wasn't right. To answer, somehow, to Leonardo's anger with some display of…anything to stop it all, anything to try an drive back time. Stop the bomb. But nothing tumbled from his lips because panic had grabbed hold of him so tightly that any attempts at escape were frozen.

Then Leonardo turned, his movement abrupt and fluid at once, and left any words they could have had dying in the air, unspoken. He flung the door open with a gesture so violent the metal shuddered, and turned to Donatello. "I'm going back to get him," he said with his voice rough and rushed, "Get the battleshell out of here. We'll meet up with you later."

The red numerals had already ticked away two minutes. Donatello fiddled with the control panel without argument, his forehead wrinkled, mouth drawn tightly in at the corner.

Michelangelo stumbled forward. "Wait, you can't go alone," he said, making a grab at Leonardo's shoulder, "Let me go with you!"

His brother turned so swiftly that he couldn't catch the movement; he was as lightning-quick as a striking snake. Leonardo, one hand gripping the door frame, turned and placed his free hand squarely in the center of Michelangelo's chest and shoved. It was hard enough to send him stumbling against the opposite wall, eyes wide and gasping with surprise, and Leonardo narrowed his eyes at him from the doorway.

"_You'll stay here_," he snarled, every word an order, and then he was gone.

* * *

In his mind, a brief memory flashed.

It was exactly eleven at night, and they had not yet begun the botched mission. Donatello and Raphael had already scaled the walls up to the top of the building, ready and waiting for him and Leonardo to meet them at the top.

Michelangelo was at the bottom because he was having the world's worst luck and had broken one of his shuko spikes on a piece of pipe, and now had to enlist aid from Leonardo. Of course. He was present in all things lately, Michelangelo remembered thinking, but it was probably that he was so much more aware of his presence now.

"Hang on to my shoulder," Leonardo ordered, wrapping an arm up around his shell to support him.

Michelangelo's muscles tensed as he felt himself trying to ignore the closeness, and he dug one of the spikes into the brick of the wall. "Got it," he said, lifting himself clear. He pushed himself up too quickly, breaking free a small chunk of the brick and sending him flailing back onto the cement. "Frick-damn," he cursed under his breath, kicking the chunk of the building away in frustration.

When he got back up, Leonardo was looking at him closely in that way that meant he was reaching a slow conclusion, and he smiled a little unsteadily at him. "Sorry. Got a little impatient. Let's try this again," he said, reaching to hook the spikes back into a likely-looking patch of brick.

"Mikey, is there something wrong?" Leonardo asked, and he almost slipped off the wall again. Leonardo had looked at him with solemn, questing eyes: that 'I can see into your soul' stare that he'd picked up from Master Splinter. It was worrying because sometimes it was like he got not only the stare but the insight that came with it, and the last thing he wanted was his brother having any inkling of what his thought processes were like lately.

"Yes. There's something wrong. There's something horribly wrong. In fact," he said with what he considered perfect delivery, "It's making it impossible to climb this wall. Don't worry, though, it's obvious what this is. I'm missing one of my hand claws."

Leonardo just glared at him and folded his arms, waiting for him to drop the bullshit and start talking. Clearly that approach just wasn't going to work this time.

"No. Nothing's wrong," he said abruptly and turned around again. This time the spikes caught perfectly and he pulled himself up right, and Leonardo had no choice but to climb up with him or lose his balance. This didn't stop him from locking them in place a few feet up the wall, keeping them dangling as he resumed the line of questioning.

"If there's something going on with you, I need to know," Leonardo said in a hush, his breath brushing the side of his face, "Because you've been acting distracted and strange, and I don't think it's about you and Raph, and I don't think it's about what we did to you. You need to tell me because, even if you're angry at me for some reason, we can't keep up like this if you think it could affect your fighting. You need to tell me, because I'm worried about you and keeping you alive if you keep slipping up like you're doing in training." By the end of it, his tone had gone from calm to pointedly frustrated.

Michelangelo pushed his arm out and got another handhold, forcing Leonardo along again. "It's not changing anything," he said, and that was it. The end.

Only it did change, and he was an idiot for thinking it couldn't.

He was an idiot and now they were both in danger.

* * *

Donatello was quiet as the battleshell pulled out from its niche in the alleyway and they drove at top speed down the street. It wasn't as though he'd have been able to carry on a conversation anyway: he had to look at the road and pay close attention to incoming traffic, had to look out to make sure they didn't end up crashing into a building or off the piers. Donatello had a working way to distract himself away from the countdown, from the seconds snapping by one after the other, and Michelangelo envied him for that.

He tried to look anywhere else but the screen, but his eyes kept wrenching back to the numbers. How long would it take for Leonardo to find Raphael, and how long to get them both out? In his mind, he kept picturing everything going wrong: his brother already killed by the Foot, or being dragged out to a locked van, Leonardo attacking and going down under enemy assault. Raphael, tied up and beaten in a car headed for Foot headquarters, Leonardo searching in the building and the surrounding area in vain. A thousand awful scenarios ran through his mind, rushing through like a hurricane and leaving him shaking.

The clock said nine minutes, then eight and fifty-nine seconds, fifty-eight and he was tracing footsteps in his head and praying that they'd be fast, that the fucking god of Ninjitsu would give them black wings or something and that they'd somehow magically show up. Why not? There had been crazier getaways than this, more close calls. It was surreal, putting everything in perspective. When they ended up fighting against dinosaur aliens and ancient evils and government-mutated monsters, it seemed completely impossible that they could be taken out by something as mundane as an explosion. Pfft, explosions, right? They'd seen those plenty of times.

The streetlights flashed by, a stream of interrupted light.

Michelangelo took a breath and leaned against the glass of the window. Refrained the urge to roll it down and grab a breath of cold night air, because for some reason that would make everything feel too real. He kept telling himself in a hushed chant that they'd be back, they'd be safe, they were coming any second, and then Donatello snapped at him to shut up and he continued chanting in his head. _Please be safe, please be safe._ Like a prayer.

His mouth was dry enough to stick his tongue to the roof of his mouth. They were past the danger zone now, and Donatello pulled the battleshell into a sheltered area near the water and slumped forward so abruptly it startled him. It looked like an invisible someone had been holding him upright and they'd suddenly let go and let gravity do its work.

Usually he'd reach out to touch his brother's shoulder and try to lighten the mood, but his arms felt frozen and his tongue was too heavy for him to joke with.

He closed his eyes and thought of Leonardo with Raphael, making their way out of danger as they totally had to be doing, because there couldn't be any other way. They could be running the opposite way out of the blast splash zone, or they could be swimming out through the river. Maybe they were in a hijacked Foot-property black car, chasing right behind them, and soon they'd come up, waving and giving the thumbs-up signal for everything being okay. The image was painfully clear for a second, every detail perfectly picked out like the blueprint for a happy ending.

Then there were only seconds left. Donatello looked up with him, eyes glued to the numbers _ten_, _nine_, _eight._

Like there was an invisible set of strings directing their movements, they both snapped their gaze to the windows. Six seconds, six, five, they hadn't called yet, they hadn't called yet, they weren't _safe_…

In some wild burst of desperation he jerked down on the door handle and rolled out onto gravel and dirt and summer-dried grass, hitting the ground with a heavy thunk. Donatello rolled his head out of the car and reached out an arm, like he was drowning in the river and Don was trying to pull him back out.

Gravel scratched against his skin as he pulled himself to his hands and knees. He didn't know what he was thinking. Maybe he wasn't thinking, maybe it was just the instinct of 'they're in danger, go get help' flooding through his body and working his arms and legs on their own. Michelangelo spat out dirt and felt blood in his mouth, iron-metal and stinging, and then there was the explosion.

It lit up the horizon in bright yellow and white, filled his ears with thunder as the building blew up and the ones surrounding it were hit by propelled debris. Even where they were, far from danger of flung debris and fire, he felt the need to bury his face in his arms and flinch away.

Something clicked in his head in that moment of the noise and chaos and fire. It was like the time they'd spent driving away from the buildings and waiting for the countdown to finally tick away had been spent in a dream, and this was when he finally woke up.

It was like someone had snapped their fingers in front of his eyes and for one second he was alert and aware of everything: Donatello covering his eyes with his hand next to him, the flames shooting into the sky, reflected on the water, the black outline of the buildings burnt into his eyes…and he felt in a heady burst of utter certainty that they were dead, that he'd _felt_ his brothers _die_.

Then it was over and they watched silently as great clouds of smoke climbed up to the stars and listened to the crackling sound of fire devouring whatever it could touched. There was that metallic, sharp, burnt metal scent-taste in the air that meant buildings were burning.

Michelangelo felt so numb that it took him a few minutes to realize the whining, howling noises were police sirens.

Donatello had his arm. "Mikey, we can't stay here. Come on, get in, we need to get somewhere safe."

"But we can't leave-" his voice had a desperate catch in it as he was tugged to his feet. "We can't, I mean, what if they-"

He stopped. Couldn't say the last bit, because he didn't know what it was he would say and the words themselves seemed dangerous.

"There's no time, the police are coming," Donatello snapped, jerking him into the battleshell in a way that forced him to climb up to the seat or be painfully sandwiched between the side of the van and the door. He turned the key in the ignition and they were off before Michelangelo had a chance to buckle his seatbelt in, which was blatant disregard for safety. Neither of them were too concerned at this point.

"We're too close to the accident," Donatello muttered, either to himself or to Michelangelo, it wasn't apparent which, "The police would be suspicious of us being in such proximity to the explosion. They'd have either tried to keep us there as witnesses or as suspected arsonists, either of which would be very bad for reasons I shouldn't have to mention. Leo and Raph will…they'll call us on the shell cell when they can, okay?"

He said it all very precisely, like he was laying out instructions for a chemistry experiment, but his hands on the steering wheel were gripped with a tightness that left bone-white showing on the knuckles.

Michelangelo buckled his seatbelt silently and put his head in his hands.

* * *

They ended up only a few miles away in the cover of closed buildings and shuttered residential places, mainly dark and deep in slumber. After all, it was that time between night and early morning, the sky a brooding headache-grey, and nothing but 7-11s open for business.

Both of them just sat together, not willing to go back to the Lair without their brothers with them, not wanting to talk to each other while they were both practically radiating tension. So, they just sort of existed there in a vegetable state, wound up to tightly that the slightest suggestion of a ringing sound had them jumped out of their seats to scrabble for the nearest shell cell. Donatello hadn't talked to him about leaving Raphael behind. He wondered why not.

The countdown screen was in front of him, caught in the numbers 00:00, completely unmoving and dead. He knocked it off of the dashboard with a sweep of his hand and a muttered curse, and Donatello just gave him a look of endless and solemn disapproval. It reminded him so much of Leonardo that he couldn't stand to keep looking at him, so he ended up turning to the side, jamming himself up against the window, and watching headlights on passing cars go by. Far away, drifts of smoke were still visible against the sky, piling slim fingers of grey up in the air.

Michelangelo's eyes felt heavy, like they did when he was exhausted but couldn't get himself to sleep, and he listened to Donatello's breathing and the faint sounds of the city at night leaking in through the windows. He felt that somehow the time didn't feel real.

An hour or so might have passed by like that before the shell cell started to beep.

Donatello nearly knocked himself out of his seat grabbing for it, and Michelangelo jammed his fingers on his armrest as he made a simultaneous attempt. He shook his hand, trying to brush the pain away, and when Donatello said in a rush: "Leo? Where are you? Raph's there?" he felt a jolt of relief stab through his gut. It was like he let go holding his breath after a lifetime of being underwater. Then he thought, _It's so dumb, we almost got killed a lot of times before, why did this seem like it was crazy-scary? I mean, once we almost got eaten by dinosaurs._

That seemed to put the insanity into perspective, and he fought a giggle that would no doubt become hysterical really quick.

Then they rushed out into the slowly-turning-sunrise to find their brothers.

When they found them, Raphael and Leonardo were huddled by the riverside a few miles from where the explosion hit. They just parked the battleshell hastily and ran out, Donatello dragging a first aid kit and Michelangelo just plain running, wanting to fling himself at them and say sorry the fifteen million times he figured he'd need to. The headlights lit up the patch of grass, litter and gravel and skipped bits of light over the water.

Then Leonardo stood up, and Michelangelo's breath caught in his throat. He'd stood very carefully, and in the glare of the headlights it was easy to see why he'd picked himself to his feet with such delicate care.

He was wet from the river, his skin gleaming, and over his shoulder there was a winding blotch of exposed redness, dark patches and raw bloodiness. There were burns on his legs, too, not as bad but still evident. At his feet, Raphael was lying prone, legs and arms sprawled out. One of his legs looked strange, and it was darkly bruised to a shade of sullen purple-black.

Michelangelo felt a dizzy kind of buzzing in his head as he rushed over to them, barely noticing Donatello swooping to Raphael's side with the first aid kit. "Are you okay? Is Raph okay? Is he gonna be-"

Leonardo reached out and gripped him by the shoulder a little too hard, and swung him around to look at him. "Don't move him," he said with a sharp edge to his voice, "He's got a broken leg and he's unconscious. We just barely got out. Go make yourself useful and get the splints from the battleshell."

He thought he could hear the unspoken blame in Leonardo's voice telling him it was all his fault, that he didn't have the right to help Raph or even talk to him right now. He thought maybe if he looked up a little higher and saw his eyes, the accusation would all be there, staring at him.

Michelangelo fled to the battleshell for the splints without daring a glance backwards. His stomach twisted and threatened to make its way up his throat as he worked on setting the broken leg with Donatello, especially when he saw the preciseness of the blow, how they'd broken the leg in two places with scientific precision. _Your fault, because you couldn't ignore Leo._

"They didn't want him escaping," Leonardo said with quiet rage from where he was applying antiseptic cream to his burns, "I made it there before they started on the other one and his arms."

Somehow they managed to get Raphael's leg properly taken care of and his burns slathered with cream and loosely bandaged. Leonardo took care of his own injuries, and Michelangelo tried not to look when his back was turned so he wouldn't see that the burn twined around to the back of his neck and that his shell was smoked over. Nobody felt like talking much when they started driving back home, especially when with every bump on the road, Raphael made sort of an unconscious grunt of pain.

The sun was rising when they managed to stumble into the lair, lugging Raphael on the stretcher. Master Splinter swept a single look at them, taking everything in, and ordered them to bed.

"You will explain in the morning," he said, ushering Donatello and Leonardo to the couch so they could make Raphael as comfortable as possible, "Now, you must allow your bodies to rest."

Michelangelo crept silently to his room and climbed the ladder to his bed. There were constellations glued to his ceiling, the cheap, plastic kind people bought from the dollar store for kid's bedrooms. He stared at them instead of sleeping, and eventually the glowing patterns just kept rearranging themselves to look like Leonardo's burned shoulder and Raphael, unconscious on the ground and Leo's accusing stare.

* * *

Master Splinter called him for a talk when Leonardo had finished reporting the various horrors of their last mission.

Michelangelo had been expecting to get a huge lecture, so it wasn't surprising when his father came up and beckoned him over. He'd actually been hoping for it, for at least someone to sit him down and tell him thoroughly how much he'd completely screwed up. He wanted to be denied snack food for life, or made to do intensive practice every day and a hundred back-flips, or be Raphael's slave for life, or something drastic.

Instead, Splinter just sat there, looking at him in quiet, solemn disappointment, and he wanted to shrink into a tiny ball and die.

"I never thought one of my sons would be so irresponsible as to leave his brother in battle and forget about his plight," Master Splinter said. His voice was quiet and calm, but every word was as heavy as a lead weight on Michelangelo's shoulders. "There is no excuse for recklessness of that level, Michelangelo. Such mistakes can easily get your brothers killed. Even in this case, Raphael and Leonardo were injured because of your carelessness. Do not lower your eyes to the floor. _Look at me_."

He had to pry his gaze from the floor. ''M sorry, sensei," he said, the words running together on his tongue.

"I will not ask you to explain yourself, because there is no explanation possible that would make the situation justified. You will begin extra meditation practice with me to improve your focus, and you will not be allowed out of the home for a week. During the hours you usually spend in free time, I expect you to be improving your concentration skills, and at the end of the week I will test your progress."

"Yes, sensei," he said, trying to keep meeting his eyes. It was hard when every muscle in his body wanted to slump and flinch away. "I'm sorry." Not enough, though, he thought to himself. Not enough, because nothing's gone away and I hurt them. Not enough I'm sorry's in the world. He wanted to tell Master Splinter that, that he'd finally found somewhere 'sorry' just wasn't good enough, but he kept quiet.

"You may leave. Go to the kitchen and eat with your brothers. You will need your energy."

That was all very well and good in theory, but he couldn't eat that morning. He poured milk into his bowl of overly-sugary cereal and stared at it, pushing the flakes around until they congealed into a soggy, lumpy mess. His stomach was curled in on itself and refused to even entertain the thought of taking in anything, so he drank a lot of apple juice and hoped the sugar in that would be enough to keep him energized.

Raphael had spent most of breakfast watching him, he noticed, but he hadn't looked up to meet his stare. Not only had he made his brother hate him somehow by kicking him off the stairs, but now he'd almost got him killed, and he probably thought that he hated him enough to try a murder attempt. Michelangelo wanted desperately to explain everything, but so far nothing good had come up in his mind and he knew eventually it'd all come out as mumbles and 'ums' and stuttering anyway. So that was it, then.

Michelangelo wanted desperately to say 'I'm sorry, I didn't want to almost get you killed, I'll slave over you until you get fixed up,' but that struck him as something really odd to discuss over cornflakes. He wanted to say something similar to Leonardo, but the words kept rearranging themselves in his mind until they were unrecognizable.

Then it was time for practice, and too late for anything but a mumbled 'see you,' to Raphael, and he tipped the soggy mess out of his cereal bowl and into the trash bin and made his way to the dojo.

At first, it was only he and Donatello working on the heavy-duty physical exercises, since Leonardo's wounds would reopen if he went through anything that intensive, and Raphael of course had a broken leg. They performed special training under Master Splinter's watchful eye, to make sure they didn't overextend themselves. Michelangelo didn't talk much to them, feeling like he should leave them alone as much as possible. After all, they wouldn't have even ended up with their injuries if it wasn't for him.

Most of his time was spent throwing himself into the concentration exercises Splinter had assigned him, and they tended to take up an nice chunk of his free time. It was a relief to have an actual sanctioned excuse for avoiding everybody.

The first day Leonardo came back to the normal practice grind, Master Splinter set him and Leonardo sparring while Donatello went through sequences of forms alone

Michelangelo tried not to look at Raphael's figure in the entertainment room, some video game playing on the main TV screen, and tried not to look directly into Leonardo's eyes because he felt like all his thoughts were bleeding right out of him for anyone to see. He ended up being unable to look anywhere for long, his gaze flitting from his brother's swords to the dojo floor to Master Splinter, who was sitting in the corner and watching them spar.

Leonardo swung his blade down in a very quick strike, and Michelangelo ducked under it and had to stumble back when the second blade went just under his chin. His mind was on evading the blows, not countering, but he spun a nunchuck out with trepidation he usually never felt in sparring. It didn't take, Leonardo easily knocked it aside and planted a foot in Michelangelo's gut.

He went down rolling and got up quickly, knowing Leonardo would be ready to pin him if he stayed down for too long, and went back on the defensive, cautiously circling. Michelangelo managed to dodge and evade a few more blows before Leonardo got the best of him with a well-aimed flying kick and a couple of strikes with the flat of his blade, and he didn't put up much of a fight when he went down.

This seemed to enrage his brother. Leonardo yanked him to his feet and forced him to get into a stance again.

"But you just beat me," he said, feeling a little lost, "It's Donnie's turn to spar with you."

"You're not even trying to fight me, Michelangelo," Leonardo said, looking at him coldly, "You're not attacking, you're only fighting defensively. I watched you practicing with Don before, and you're definitely slipping even when you do make attacks. Your focus has gone, and your coordination is steadily getting worse. I don't know what you expect to achieve with a strategy like that, but we're not ending our sparring session unless you start putting some effort into it. I'm not playing your little games, especially not today."

They fought again, Michelangelo trying to slowly tire him out without landing a blow, Leonardo ruthlessly trying to force his hand because he was obviously a madman who wanted to be attacked. He went down again, sprawling on the floor after Leonardo managed to get in a hit that smacked him up against the wall.

"Get up and do it again," Leonardo snapped out, eyes narrowed and swords at the ready, "You're being too clumsy in your attacks, when you even bother to make an attack! Stop feeling sorry for yourself and start working! It's too late to change your mistake, and none of this is helping Raph any, so cut it out!"

The words stung. He rolled to his feet and struck out with his nunchucks wildly, looking for an opening. The move itself had no skill behind it, just desperate frustration as Leonardo easily struck each of the blows away, looking almost bored with the action. Michelangelo spun his weapons and used them to push his way closer to Leonardo, shooting them out and trying to land a blow. He felt dizzy, almost lightheaded as he did so, his concentration shot and his coordination awkward.

"You're still playing around, " Leonardo said, throwing every word out like they were punches, and caught one of his chucks on the blade of his sword. He swung it upwards with such force Michelangelo had to let go or lose an inch of skin on his palm.

The weapon flew against the wall behind them and clattered to the ground, and Leonardo forced another attack, making a feint with his swords to drive him against the wall, then kicked him to the ground.

Michelangelo reached up and tried to knock Leonardo down with him, but just ended up getting his hand carefully pinned to the floor by his brother's foot. It wasn't enough pressure to badly hurt or injure his hand, but definitely enough to allow him to know that injury _could_ come at any second. It really hurt, and it didn't look as though Leonardo was going to get off any time soon.

He was starting to get annoyed with this game of 'hey, let's try to make Mikey snap until he can fulfill my bizarre idea of what practice should be like', so he kicked out from the wall and swept his leg in a wide arc in an attempt knock Leonardo off his feet. Maybe once he was on the floor, Michelangelo could flee from this madness.

It didn't work that way, unfortunately. He leapt backwards instead, at least giving Michelangelo enough time to yank his hand away and retrieve his weapons before they were at it again, as he felt himself getting angrier and more tired with each blow he took.

All of his attacks were being blocked or barely having an effect, and he felt himself getting more frustrated as it went on, as Leonardo kept slipping in past his own attacks, hitting him and dodging out just as smoothly.

He suddenly realized what Raphael must have felt when he used his special mind-tricks on him and teased him until he lost control. It wasn't right, he shouldn't be getting done in by his own routine like this, but his head was too heavy to think straight and he just didn't care anymore, it was practice, he'd screwed up, why drag it out?

He wondered if this was some kind of long and drawn-out punishment Leo had decided to inflict on him, and felt a little angrier.

Leonardo ended up tripping him up so he sprawled out onto the floor for what felt like the fiftieth time that session, and grabbed his nunchucks from his flailing hands.

Michelangelo shook his head dizzily and raised himself up on his arms. Leonardo dropped his weapons carelessly to the ground, and they ended up landing on the floor in front of his face.

"Are you trying to make me feel sorry for you?" Leonardo asked, or taunted, really. It was definitely the wrong thing to say.

Michelangelo jerked his head up to glare at him and felt his eyes sting and he wanted to scream at him that no, that wasn't how he wanted him to feel at all, that was the last fucking feeling in all the world he wanted him to direct his way. Wanted to scream everything at him and see how he reacted to that. Instead, he just leapt at him in one swift, fluid motion, knocking him to the floor.

Leonardo brought his swords up defensively in a perfect lock, but Michelangelo ignored their sharp pressure against the sides of his neck and grabbed Leo by the shoulders, pressing his fingers into his skin. "Shut up, Leo!" he said, and felt shocked to hear that his voice sounded on the edge of teary hysteria, "You don't…you just don't have a clue, alright? So just shut up about me, okay? You don't know one…damn…thing!"

Someone tugged at him. Had been tugging him, he suspected, since he'd jumped on Leonardo. He turned and saw Master Splinter looking at him with grave concern in his eyes, and turned back to look at Leonardo under his hands, eyes wide but mouth steady and grim, and he felt his head spin and the room blur for a second as he had a moment's thought that this was completely unreal and all he'd have to do was blink and he'd be waking up in his bed.

Then the moment passed and he closed his eyes and stepped up and away. "I'm…I need to…excuse me, sensei," he managed to get out before running up to his room.

He felt like he needed to vomit, but the last twinges of sanity in him indicated that this would be a horrible idea because he might just collapse into some horrible vomiting heap and go postal. He was still angry, so angry he wanted to crash around and ruin things, or run for miles without stopping, or just scream his embarrassingly high-pitched scream until his voice went dead.

Instead, he just fell down on his beanbag and crushed a pillow into his face and tried to get it together. The room still smelled like hundreds of incense brands, he still felt like puking, and his life was falling apart like a cardboard house in the rain.

"I hate you," he told himself, his voice muffled in the pillow, "You're wrecking everything."

* * *

"My son," Master Splinter told him when they were alone again, a small pot of tea sending up steam like the buildings had sent forth smoke, "You must not allow anger and pain to eat at you from within. If you feel you have a problem, you may come to me at any time."

"Yeah, I know," he said, but he knew he had run a long way away from when he could come to his father and cry about his problems and be comforted. He left, feeling Splinter's gaze follow him out the door.

* * *

He was dreaming. He knew it. There was the fogginess of time, the lead in his limbs that made him move like a puppet, slow and disjointed, and the utter unreality of the landscape.

Michelangelo's first thought was disconnected, whimsical: '_the sky must have fallen here_.' There was no sky where he was, only blackness on all sides, filling in the horizon and coloring the sides and ground of the dreamscape. In the air, there was an oppressive chilliness, dank as the air in a dungeon.

He wandered through the darkness fearlessly, a tiny candle flame hovering in front of him to light the way. He could feel that there was something he was looking for that he was desperate to find, something he needed to get to soon. Around him, red neon numbers glowed dimly in the air and began to count down at different paces, filling the air with the ominous sounds of them ticking away the seconds to disaster.

A hot wind swept by him and he started running, moving faster and faster as he searched blindly through the darkness, calling out in desperation. For a while he couldn't imagine what or who he was looking for, or why, or even how long. The clocks keeping time went at separate paces, but none of them had ended just yet. 'Save him', his mind was screaming at him, 'save him, save him,' so he kept running.

When the candle flame came to a glint of silver, he stopped.

On first glance it appeared to be a nightmare of barbed wire and twisted metal, something like an art student's idea of a briar bush done in cubism. Then he saw the hand reaching from it, and the shape inside it, and his heart jumped painfully. Leonardo was in there, the metal pressed to him like a person-shaped cage, and he was trapped. Well, how couldn't he be trapped? He was in a giant metal atrocity.

His fingers fumbled at the thing but they kept passing right through, and Leonardo looked at him with dull, disinterested eyes.

"I'll be fine," his brother told him, sounding tired and washed out, "I'll be fine. Just find Raph. He's on the other side of here. Go find Raph, he's lost." Leonardo was caught in a way that should have had all the spikes and jagged edges of the cage pressing into his body, and for a moment he was glad of the darkness hiding whether or not his brother was being impaled in there.

"What're you talking about, you can't stay here! It's almost time for everything to explode! Leo, can't you see the clock?" he frantically tried to point them out, but Leonardo just stared into space.

"It's all right, Mikey, it's just Donnie working on something in the lab," he said, "But make sure you keep an eye on Raph, okay? He's lost." Somewhere in the background he could hear Donatello's voice going smoothly over the instructions on how to defuse a bomb, but for some reason he messed up when it came to the wires and had to start over from the beginning again and again. There weren't any wires.

Michelangelo kept trying to rip the cage open, feeling hopelessly desperate because something was going to happen, something awful, if he couldn't take him out.

His hands just kept sweeping straight through the wires and bars, like either he or it was a ghost. "I can't open it," he said, feeling panicked, the numbers were getting fewer and he had to hurry or they would die, even in a dream, "I can't, Leo, it's slippery, I can't get you out. I can't!"

"Of course not," Leonardo said, sounding impatient, "All of this is you."

And the metal creaked as if to emphasize his response.

The candle flame that had been following him as a lantern suddenly exploded outwards, filling the space with blazing light and heat. Flames circled the cage neatly, not quite making it through the bars. Behind him, he could hear Raphael screaming for him. When he spun around, he could just see him, a dark shape in the flames. His leg was broken, and he was sitting on an armchair like he was getting ready to watch a football game.

"He's not going to make it," Donatello remarked gravely, suddenly standing near him. He sounded as conversational as a person would be if they were talking about the weather turning bad, "I turned everything back in order, but he can't leave. Then again, I don't remember programming this correctly, there may be a few mechanical difficulties. I will have to recalibrate something, excuse me. Hold this for me," he said, and all of a sudden he found himself holding an octagonal piece of metal. Donatello had already gone out into the flames, passing as quickly as a ghost.

Michelangelo spun around and saw that the circle of flames had managed to creep inside Leonardo's cage, but for some reason were curling around his toes without burning them. A patch of flame was licking steadily at his shoulder, and he could smell it burning the skin, the sharp-sweet stench of cooking meat.

"They're not going to make it, Mikey," Leonardo said, calm and steady like he didn't notice that he was on fire, "You need to go, you need to listen to me. Don't pay attention to Donnie's inventions, alright? They don't mean anything, they don't even have batteries in them. Go take them from the fire, and make sure Raph minds that leg. We ran out of band-aids yesterday."

"You're going to die!" he screamed at him, pushing through the barbed wire. The fire wasn't burning him, he noticed dimly, it didn't even feel warm.

"It's just practice," Leonardo told him calmly.

He couldn't hear Raphael calling his name anymore, he couldn't hear Donatello's low, muttering science babble, but he must have fixed the bomb right because the numbers had all aligned and counted down from ten, nine, to eight, and he _couldn't_, couldn't tear himself away from Leonardo burning in his cage. The others were dying and he couldn't go to them. "I'm sorry," he said over and over again, not quite knowing who or what he was apologizing to, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!"

Three.

Two.

_One_.

Everything exploded into light, but not before he could hear Leonardo telling him that sorry wasn't good enough if he wasn't going to change because of it.

* * *

Michelangelo woke up from that dream shaking so hard it was painful. After that he tried to exhaust himself so thoroughly during the day that he'd slip straight into deep sleep mode without even touching an REM cycle.

Practice became sort of a long masochism trip, where he'd train until he could feel exhaustion sinking into his bones. He tried everything physical short of flinging himself off of tall buildings for fun. Throwing himself off of buildings had actually occurred to him at some point, but naturally with equipment and stuff. Grappling hooks. He'd stopped slipping up and grappling things that would come loose too easily, like street lamps and other breakable building apparatus'.

The reason he hadn't tried flinging himself off of buildings like an urban George of the Jungle was because he knew someone would probably spot him doing it, and he didn't need anyone from the Justice Force showing up and asking him about his new hobbies.

Instead, he wore out his skateboard until a wheel broke off when he was trying a flip, sending him crashing into the concrete and sewer water. He ended up trying to fix it himself, but made it worse instead and now he had to wait for another one to be made or found. After that, he just ran around the sewers, scavenging for Donatello or just running around in aimless circles, cart wheeling and back-flipping and coming up with hundreds of games to keep himself occupied. Michelangelo threw himself into ninjitsu when they went through exercises, training, sparring, anything to wear himself out.

It didn't really work. Instead of wearing him out cleanly for a nice dream-free collapse at the end of the day, it made him slow and irritable, in a perpetual state of fatigue. He took little naps that broke his days up in odd chunks, making him sit bolt upright wherever he'd conked out in, wondering what time it was. This was probably because his nights were spent with him slowly teetering into insomnia and wondering if he could sneak some sleeping pills without anyone noticing.

He lived in a house full of ninjas. Secrecy was pretty darn hard.

Raphael took him aside one day in his usual way, which meant an awkward clap on the back and a muttered: "Hey, come over here to my motorcycle room and we can talk in the sanctuary of the grease," only more gruff and less wordy.

He came along, of course, because Raphael's leg had just healed and at that point if he'd asked him to go fetch him a bag of Cheetos from a moving train he'd do so immediately. Well, maybe not immediately, he'd probably try to buy some from a shop first, but if it turned out that the train Cheetos were wonder snacks for Raph, he'd go for it.

It didn't look like this was going to be one of those kind of requests, because Raphael just sort of slumped into a chair and gave him a strange look. Michelangelo couldn't quite make out what it meant, which was unusual because he'd thought he'd catalogued all of his brother's myriad expressions by now.

Apparently he was just going to have to get used to being surprised, he thought a little bitterly.

"Look," Raphael said, sounding like he was floundering in a great ocean of awkward, "I mean, I'm sorry about getting' you mad before, okay? I really was. Still am, y'know?"

Michelangelo sat there and tried to absorb the statement. It didn't seem to make sense under the circumstances, mainly because he didn't remember being recently angry with Raphael. In fact, if anything, he'd been giving him the space it had appeared he'd wanted, so him apologizing for something managed to make zero sense.

Then comprehension slowly dawned and he felt like choking himself because here was his brother apologizing for something that happened weeks and weeks ago, and after he'd recently almost got him killed.

"Oh," he said, like a giant moron, "That's, I mean, I don't care. Not that you're sorry, I mean, I don't care about it any more, it's been…dude, look, I should be apologizing here for getting you, like, almost killed. I…I was scared. I almost, I left you, and I'm sorry. I can't…I mean, I'm sorry."

There was his typical lack of coherency back again, but this time he didn't really care. Because for a while it felt like he'd never be able or allowed to talk to Raph and say he was sorry, ever, and he'd take his unsaid apologies with him to the grave, and right now he saw how needlessly melodramatic that was and it made him want to start laughing in the insane 'I'll never stop' way again. This would obviously be a bad thing.

Raphael didn't seem to know what to do with the apology, so he just brushed it aside and called him an idiot and caught him with one of his affectionate shoulder punches. Then that was just about it for the spilling of the feelings and dramatic confessions, because Raphael wasn't the type to talk about that sort of stuff. That was okay, because with them, he really didn't need to. Then again, none of them really needed to with Michelangelo, because most of the time he already knew.

For a while they just sat around and talked some more about dumb guy stuff like bikes and wrenches and some TV show Raphael was watching, (Michelangelo felt shocked to realize that he'd actually stopped watching TV, how long had it been since he'd tuned in to watch anything, even the news?), and it was nice and quiet and brotherly in a way he was missing.

They didn't talk about missions, or practice, or the ache of healing bones and the way healing skin itched so badly. Michelangelo knew how broken legs felt, and recognized the hesitant way Raphael used his leg, like he felt unsure of the next step breaking the bone again. In the end he left, feeling happier, but still feeling unfulfilled. Like he was waiting for some kind of puzzle piece to snap into place and tell him that now things were right again.

Things _weren't_ right again. They were just different.

Meanwhile, his ninjitsu skills were slowly but surely going down the tubes. He didn't know exactly what had changed about him to make that happen, but the results were clear enough for anyone to see. Instead of being nimble and agile, he'd become actually clumsy. He missed strikes and left openings he never would before, his center was shot, and his balance was deteriorating by the day.

Then again, he supposed it could be the whole inability to sleep thing that was effecting a change in his ability to keep coordinated and alert. It didn't help in any way that Leonardo was constantly in his face about it, pushing him harder as if that could help anything instead of just making him even more irritable.

It didn't help that Leonardo was always there, asking him what was wrong, if he was okay, sometimes plain out yelling at him like this new level of suckiness was nothing but a cunning ploy to get attention. That managed to make Michelangelo even more ticked off, because who the hell did Leonardo think he was? Did he really expect him to go into elaborate ploys to get his brother's attention to fixate it only on himself? The fact that he knew he probably would if he could come up with a good enough idea didn't do anything for his mood at all.

Lately, he'd felt like a giant ball of angry energy, like he had too much feeling bursting up inside him and it was all trying to push out of his skin. He missed when problems rolled off of him like water on a duck's feathers. Right now, he was definitely waterlogged with them instead.

The lectures usually ended up with him getting an enormously horrible migraine that made him creep cautiously to his room, turn off the lights, and wait for the pain to reside.

Once, Leonardo came in when he was only half aware and thoroughly miserable, and the light from the doors was like agony in his eyes. "Go away," he'd told him, squeezing his eyes shut miserably, and was surprised when he felt the cool touch of a damp towel on his head and saw Leonardo looking at him very gravely. It made him think that he was definitely on death's doorstep if Leo was unwinding enough to play his personal nurse. There was something infinitely soothing about it all, though, the softness of the towel on his forehead, the trickle of water running down his eyes and tracing the sides of his mouth, and the formless sound of his brother's breathing as he lifted his head up to let him drink tea.

At some point he decided that he was in some hallucinatory post-migraine state and just closed his eyes and relaxed, feeling the steam from the kettle he'd brought in with him and enjoying the scent of chamomile and ginger. He fell asleep reaching out for his brother, but he didn't know what he would have done if he'd touched him.

Michelangelo woke alone, and felt like crying.

* * *

He felt horribly trapped, and for good reason. Leonardo was holding onto his door and pointedly refusing to let go. This was effectively keeping him from escaping the room and therefore, his brother and his attempts at being helpful.

They'd been in there for what felt like the last hour discussing his latest disappointments in the field, and he was beginning to get the vague aching sensation in his temples that heralded a migraine. Not that he'd let Leonardo see it, since it was entirely his fault on many levels.

"Man, how many times do I have to say that I slipped?" he snapped, "I couldn't grab hold of the rope and I slipped. It was raining. The rope was wet. Friction or something was involved, I bet, go ask Donnie. I didn't almost fall off of the fire escape to sabotage your mission, Leo! I'm not a crazy self-harming type thing, okay? People have off days!"

All right, it was something of an understatement to call it an off day, all things considered. He'd been having an off _month_. He'd been to see Master Splinter for meditation over a hundred times, but none of it seemed to be affecting him. Part of the reason might have been because he couldn't even meditate anymore, he just sat cross-legged with his eyes closed and tried to adjust his center or whatever it was that was supposed to help him achieve inner balance, but that relaxed state never came. He'd meditated before. It felt like sinking into clouds and soaring at the same time. Now he was blocked from that by a big raging ball of hormones.

And Leonardo just wasn't helping any with his tirade.

"What are you doing with yourself, anyway?" Leonardo said, voice perfectly steady, yet tense as a bowstring ready to snap, "I can't understand you lately. You practice all day but you're steadily growing worse, and your concentration, which has never been off the charts,"

"Thanks," Michelangelo said tersely.

Leonardo continued, ignoring the interruption, "Is now almost completely nonexistent. Mikey, I threw that rope at you and you had it in your hand, and then, for some reason, you couldn't hold onto it. What were you thinking, if you were even thinking at all? Do you know you might have been killed if Don hadn't grabbed on to you? And even then you ended up falling down the fire escape, what if you'd broken something? We were being chased, we can't afford to always wait up for you!"

Michelangelo had been standing in the rain, his mind fogged up and sleep-deprived, the Red Bulls he'd downed before the mission slowly draining away. He'd been startled by the sudden arrival of the rope in his hand and even more taken aback when Leonardo had tugged at it, clearly intending for him to swing up to him. Instead, he'd rocked back unsteadily, and fell down toward the hard sidewalk stories below.

"I feel loved, thanks for that. If it's so hard for you, then just leave me behind," he said, feeling as off-balance as he had on the edge of the rooftop, "I mean it. I can just stay home until I stop sucking so hard, okay?"

"That's not what I want," Leonardo said, sounding tired and a little frustrated, "None of us want to leave you behind. It wouldn't feel right, and you know that. We're a _team_, Mikey, and that means-"

"I know what it means," he interrupted, "Look, I'm just…I've been having problems lately, but I can fix them, okay? It's not anything to be crazy about, I got it under control. I'm gellin' like, uh, like that commercial, okay?" He heard an edge of hysteria in his voice and cleared his throat, hoping it wasn't obvious.

Leonardo's cool stare told him that it probably was. "You're not," he said so full of confidence and certainty that it was really infuriating, especially when _he_ couldn't really be sure of anything these days. "You're not all right, you're not controlling it, and I've been watching you fall apart for weeks. Did you think I wouldn't care?"

"No," he said, because that wasn't it at all. He'd thought they wouldn't notice all that much.

It seemed like a really stupid thought now, with Leonardo standing in front of him like a solid wall of concern. Well, fundamentally concern, with a lot of irritation and anger overlaying that. Not that everyone in his family hadn't had a go talking to him and trying to see if there was anything they could do to help him. Then there was the fighting when they thought he was playing around, and the constant attempts to cheer him up when it was obvious he wasn't, and the meditation sessions when it looked like he was losing focus again and again.

In hindsight, they'd made a lot of effort to make him better, to fix him somehow. His family had heaped up attention on him in buckets and he'd thought they were worried because of the physical problem, because he was losing so much they might have to leave him behind. It hadn't really occurred to him that they'd noticed something was wrong emotionally.

That probably was supposed to make him feel better but it didn't. All it did was make him feel sick and paranoid.

"Just leave me alone," he said finally, "You can't help me, okay?"

His brother narrowed his eyes at him and the edge of his mouth twitched downwards. "Maybe I could try if you actually started to talk to someone, Mikey. You haven't been speaking to anyone. You're never this reclusive. You never have fights with me like you've been doing. There is something wrong with you, and you're an idiot if you think I'm just going to walk away until we start sorting this out."

"God dammit, Leo!" Desperate, he tried to get to the door. Leonardo pushed him back effortlessly, making him stumble against the wall.

Michelangelo knew he would do it and would probably stay there until the end of time if he could get what he wanted. He didn't trust himself to be able to come up with a likely story and he didn't believe Leonardo would believe the lie even if he told it convincingly enough to fool anyone else. He wanted to yell for someone to come save him from this obsessed madman, but was pretty certain that anyone he did call would take Leonardo's side in this misguided intervention plan.

"Is it drugs?" Leonardo sounded like he was taking a stab in the dark and not that he actually suspected he was taking anything, but the fact he'd raised the suspicion was like a slap in the face, "Recreational drugs, like ecstasy? It would explain the lack of concentration and coordination you're having, and the fact that you're so secretive about whatever problem you have. Alcohol?"

"You know I'd never do that."

"I _hope_ you'd never do that. Then again, I never thought you'd forget a brother in the middle of a fight and leave him in life-threatening danger. What other impossible things are you going to start doing?"

He narrowed his eyes at him and felt a wild, crazy sort of anger crackle through him. "That's not fair, Leo. That's so beyond the borderline of wrong it's…damn you! You KNOW how bad I feel about that! You _know_!"

"And you'll keep on endangering everybody if you don't start shaping up!" Leonardo said, his voice low, intense, "What's going to keep you from slipping up again when you can't even pay attention to a weapon aimed at your head? When you can't keep yourself out of danger, there's no way you can be entrusted to anyone else's lives! And we can't leave you at home forever, Mikey. Unless that's what you want. Is that it? You want to pig out on junk food in front of the TV all day, too lazy to go out on nightly patrols with us?"

"Shut up, Leo," he said. There was an edge to his voice that scared him.

"Why? I haven't seen any reason to believe otherwise. You certainly haven't provided any good reasons for your behavior. All I've seen from you is hedging and excuses even after all of Master Splinter's efforts to get you back into shape. Maybe you're right and it's nothing important at all. Maybe you're playing your video games too much again, and you're ignoring your training so you can reach a high score on some fantasy realm that doesn't exist or you've been too busy with your comic books to notice everyone's worried about you. You're selfish and childish, Michelangelo, and you don't seem to understand that your actions are going to have consequences. You.-"

Michelangelo charged at him and tried to use that moment of shock to make it through to the door. He wrestled with him, trying to move his arm away from the edge of the doorframe. "Dammit, let me go! You've made your point, okay?" he spat at him, "Get away from me! Get out!"

Leonardo stood his ground. "Not until you tell me what's wrong with you! Tell me. I am not leaving until you do," he added, apparently to drive the point home.

His head was racing and he felt angry confused, frustrated, terrified. Trapped. Michelangelo pressed his head against Leonardo's arm and let out a breath, trying to steady himself. "I _can't_. I can't. Don't make me."

His brother laughed, and he felt that wild, fierce anger surge up through him in a burst.

"Mikey, being corny about it isn't going to help your case. You're being such a melodramatic child. Do you honestly think it-"

He didn't know what Leonardo was going to say, because he pushed him away in a burst of strength borne of rage. "Yes, I think it's bad enough," he snarled, his words coming out in a rushed hiss, "You want to know? You're dying to know? You won't leave me alone until you do? Fine, goddamn you Leo, it's you! You're my problem! I _want_ you. I want _you_ like normal people want boyfriends, and you're my brother!"

For a second, the words hung in the air between them and he could almost imagine he hadn't actually said them, hadn't been _insane_ enough to actually say them.

Then Leonardo took a step back, shock written across his face. His hand was on the doorknob and he stared straight at Michelangelo as if trying to divine something from his eyes, and suddenly his expression contorted in pure and unmistakable disgust, mouth twitching downward like he wanted to vomit. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something and faltered.

Before Michelangelo could even react, he'd opened the door and was gone.

_Idiot_, he thought almost dispassionately, _you're an idiot, and now he won't even want you as a brother. _

The thought set off an emotional avalanche and he choked on it, bitter and hopeless and now definitely and totally rejected. He managed to stumble to the cushions strewn haphazardly on the floor and put his face in them, his chest feeling like it was weighted down with lead and this throat burning, and broke and cried quiet, muffled, choking sobs until he couldn't feel anything anymore but his headache.

He made sure not to make any noise.


	7. no one ever said it would be this hard

**Growing Pains and Orange Bitters**

**Chapter Seven**: _no one ever said it would be this hard_

By: Serendipity

**Author's Notes: **Much thanks to _everyone _who reviewed my last chapter, I was surprised and happy to see that so many people seem to be enjoying this story. Love for all of you! You guys have no idea how much you keep me going on this baby, since I'm not usually the multi-chapter type. They make me nervous. Like…delicate baby heads or something. I always think something awful will happen and I'll never complete them in time OMG! But this story has changed that, and I owe some of that to you.

…And now that I've said that, I probably have doomed myself.

* * *

Morning came with him lying in a heap on the floor, his head stuffed in a beanbag and a definite cramp in his muscles that came from sprawling all over the hard cement like a perfect idiot. An idiot with aches in places that shouldn't even ache. His mouth tasted of dry leather, and he looked around with a strange feeling of displacement before realization hit. 

He'd told Leo. He'd _told_ Leo.

At that point he decided it might be best if he just holed himself up in his room and never went out again. He'd get a bunch of concrete blocks and cement and just wall himself up like that…guy from the Edgar Allen Poe story about wine. Everything would be much better that way. For one thing, it would entirely erase the whole problem of having to look his brother in the eye ever, ever again. And what the hell was he thinking, just telling him like that? Like it was something as simple as his fear of the dark.

And it wasn't just anyone he'd just confided in, oh no. He hadn't spilled to Donatello or Raphael or Master Splinter or anyone else equally as terrible on the Richter scale of screw-up. They would have been horrifying, but not _devastatingly_ so. No, he had to go and confess the whole crazy mess to the very person he was obsessing over, because something had obviously snapped in his brain and made him even more insane than he'd previously thought. Insane. In-freaking-_sane_.

His mind raced through the possibilities. At least, it tried to, but mainly ended up jittering incoherently and urging him to go and find a hole to throw himself into or a horrible disease to catch. Michelangelo decided he would not leave his room that day. He would stay there and pull himself together and maybe come up with some kind of excuse to nullify telling his brother that he was having illicit feelings towards him. In the very likely possibility that nothing came up, he would curl himself into a ball and just die.

He'd done it, hadn't he? He'd really done it. That was it, the end, no more.

His stomach lurched angrily and he felt suddenly and swimmingly nauseous, the worst he'd felt since getting food poisoning when he was little. It felt like someone had emptied out his head, shaken up the contents in a maraca, and dumped it all back in. Thoughts spun around and shorted out, hasty and frantic, and he wanted to just go back to sleep again. Wanted to go somewhere he didn't have to think about it.

He didn't want to think about Leonardo, didn't want to think about him pushing him away or looking at him like something disgusting Then there was the expression on his brother's face, that…he didn't want to admit it as disgust, but there it was. Hell, it had been pretty much out there in neon, written across his face. The outright rejection, even if it went unsaid. How he'd practically ran away from him. Probably wouldn't be coming back, not unless he could pull off some miracle excuse. Never again.

He hates me, he thought frantically, he hates me, he hates me.

_You're panicking, okay? You know that? You _do_ know that, right? _

Oh, god, what if he'd told the others? What if they were all lying in wait just outside the door, ready to talk to him? Or disown him, more likely, or put him through electroshock therapy and never see him again? What if Leonardo had gone to Master Splinter with this and they were getting ready to ship him away to another country?

The thought sent a lump of what felt like cold, solid rock settling down in his stomach. Of course he'd thought of leaving before, but not with the solid, tangible certainty that the option was presenting itself with now. Before, it had been something terrifying in the horizon, something that could possibly happen. It existed in that far away, hazy place where he pushed fear of death in battle or Shredder coming back or Klunk actually drowning in the sewer water.

Right now, he was pretty sure that the possibility was much closer than before, and he didn't want it. Michelangelo couldn't even picture himself somewhere where his family wasn't at least there, close enough to listen to or reach out to. Well, now the question of whether any of them would _want_ him touching them was looming, and it scared the crap out of him.

Somewhere in his mind a little voice was squeaking miserably about being alone and afraid of the dark. His saner and hopefully in-control logical mind was telling him that he was hysterical, dammit, _hysterical_, and it was time to snap out of it.

Panic was a heavy, heady feeling. He stood up and tried to shake it off, still feeling the surreal, displaced feeling. Like he wasn't really sure he was actually standing there in his bedroom, or still dreaming.

All right, he'd made the granddaddy of all mistakes, but he could probably fix it at least a little bit. So, he'd forget about the sickness, the strange, sticky misery that filled his chest and just didn't seem to want to leave. Forget the shattered feeling that, even though he'd known it was impossible and wrong, Leo just didn't want him. Maybe wouldn't want him for anything anymore, ever again.

Forget all that, Mikey, he told himself. He would go and paste a nice, normal smile on the old face, and he'd go out and tell him or them or whoever knew that…he'd tell them anything to make it better. Anything at all.

Before he could walk out of the room, someone pushed open his door.

Michelangelo suffered a momentary heart palpitation before he discovered that the intruder was Raphael, and not Leonardo come to demand him to leave.

"Oh my _god_," he gasped, still feeling the effects of his chronic nervousness, "Don't do that. The knocking thing, remember? We've all talked about the knocking thing."

Raphael leaned against the doorframe and raised an eye ridge at him with a relaxed air that probably wouldn't be in place if he'd known about the conversation last night. That was a reassuring sign.

"Master Splinter told me to come get you," his brother said, and Michelangelo's chest contracted painfully.

"Uh…yeah?" he asked, trying to be casual, with little success. He didn't sound casual. He sounded high-pitched and worried. "What for? Did I do anything? I mean, of course I didn't do anything, it's way too early for that, but…does he think I- am I in trouble?"

"Well, lemme think," Raphael said, and pretended to mull it over, "Uh, kinda. The whole oversleeping thing might just be a bad thing. It's getting near noon, Mikey. What did you do, go into another gamer marathon again?"

"It's _noon_?" he gaped, "How long was I sleeping? Oh, never mind, right," he muttered distractedly, "Right, uh, so nothing else. I'm not in trouble? He didn't look, like, mad or something?"

Raphael kind of gave him a look that told him his efforts had failed and there was a tinge of urgency in his voice that couldn't be explained away by just being worried about doing fifty back flips.

He realized that this whole casual act was a total failure because not only did he have no acting skills at all, but he was also as emotionally stable as a caffeine addict in a desert of decaf. Not only that, but he was kind of horribly desperate to find out just how bad things actually were.

The longing for an emotional breakdown worried him. He figured it was probably kind of like the way he'd want to set a broken leg quickly, so the pain would all come in a big rush and everything would be over with that quickly.

"He just seemed worried, kind of," Raphael finally said, "But Leo said you were sick last night or something-"

"I bet he did," Michelangelo snarled.

" He told us not to bother you, so we stayed clear. Look, if you're not feelin' okay…"

"I'm _fine_," he snapped, "Just give me a few seconds to get my gear on and I'll be right down."

"Well, uh…" Raphael seemed to think about his next response, "Mike, if you're having problems with Leo about the accident before, I can go and talk to him. He's been all uptight about you lately, I can get you bein' annoyed at him ."

He spun around, almost tripping over a box as he did so. "I'm not having problems with him. I have no problems with him _at all_. We're totally fine together, okay? Did he say we were having problems or something?"

Michelangelo forcibly cut himself off before he leapt at Raphael's throat with a long line of paranoid questions. "Well, we're not," he added unconvincingly. "I, he just heard me getting sick last night and made me drink some medicine."

"Sure," Raphael said. He didn't sound sure.

"I'm fine now," he said again, like he was talking about a bruise that may or may not have been healed. "Leo didn't…he wasn't…no, never mind. Let's just go."

He walked out of his room, ignoring the strong desire to stay in there and taking advantage of the sickness excuse. Good way to put it, too. He certainly felt sick enough. The whole lack of sleep problem made his mind go in thick, sluggish circles. Liking Leonardo was sick, and he found himself thinking it was too bad they didn't have pills for that kind of sickness, he'd have overdosed by now.

* * *

Leonardo gave him a very fleeting glance in the kitchen and then quickly began to pay scrutinizing attention to his bologna sandwich. 

That was _fine_, Michelangelo decided grimly as he made his way over to the table. It certainly hadn't been his own idea to force himself to spill the whole dark secret incest thing. He would have been just peachy with keeping it a secret for the rest of his damn life, and possibly if left alone, he could have reached some kind of suck plateau instead of crashing and burning like Leonardo suspected. He'd wanted to know so badly, well, now he did, and that was just fine. At least he hadn't told anyone else, from what it looked like. For one thing, there would have been a whole host of avoided eye contact instead of just Leo sitting there and dissecting the sandwich with his eyes.

And still, he didn't have to look at him like that.

Or, well, he didn't have to _not_ look at him like that, really, since no eye contact was there. The brief glance in his direction made him felt like he…maybe thought he was unstable, something that could go off at any minute. Which made him even angrier, because having angry outbursts wasn't exactly his thing unless someone was pushing him towards it. He wanted to walk over to the end of the table and grab him and force Leonardo to see him. _Well, is this what you wanted? Isn't that what you wanted to know? Didn't you say you were going to help me?_

Instead, he just sat in his chair and stared blankly at the table in front of him. Someone had put a bowl of tomato soup there, but his utter lack of hunger kept him from picking up the spoon. Wisps of steam wafted delicately away from the surface of the bowl, and he watched them curl and move like the smoke from incense.

Now that he'd seen the way Leonardo had looked at him, he just couldn't bring his eyes back up to meet his. He'd met his eyes for the briefest of moments, but not in one of those typical Leonardo searching gazes. More like he was confirming something that he'd already thought was there, and then the quick darting glance away. Like he was maybe a little afraid of him, or just afraid of talking to him, or maybe that wasn't fear or him being nervous. Maybe he just thought he was completely revolting. That was a definite possibility, too.

He didn't have a good memory for words and numbers, but pictures he remembered well. Faces and shapes, feelings and noises and colors. Things that couldn't be pinned down with any precision, things too wide and indistinct to be put into words and explained. Him shoving his brother away in a burst of heat and recklessness, and words spilling out, and then empty, aching alone-ness. Leonardo's eyes widening, then narrowing, and the quick twitch of his mouth curving downwards.

The way choking down tears made him feel like he was blocking his own air supply.

Michelangelo thought he remembered everything way too well.

"Michelangelo, are you feeling well?"

He looked up to see Master Splinter standing next to him, looking concerned.

"You have not eaten," he said, "If you are still ill, perhaps you should continue to rest."

Michelangelo felt a sharp pain in his hand, and realized he'd been gripping the spoon hard enough to leave a painful indentation in his palm. "No, I…I was just waiting for it to cool," he said, and wondered where his voice had gone lately that now it was so quiet.

When he ate it was completely robotic, his stomach apathetic about food and his mind not paying attention to it, so when he was finally done he didn't realize it until Donatello shook his shoulder and told him he'd been sitting there too long.

When he looked up, Leonardo's chair was empty.

"You want to play the Sega?" Donatello asked him, his voice quiet and thoughtful like he was trying to diagnose a problem.

They played three rounds and he lost each one, but he hadn't been playing to win, anyway.

* * *

When he came down to the kitchen around midnight because he couldn't sleep and he wanted a drink of water, he turned around after getting a cup and saw Leonardo leaning against one of the counters. He had the look of someone waiting for their own execution. 

"Michel…Mikey, do you want to…about what you said," he started hesitantly, obviously more eager to swallow his own tongue rather than talk to him about this.

"Forget it," he snapped, turning away and paying scrutinizing attention to his cup. It was a really interesting cup, he justified furiously, it had a picture of Spiderman on it and it was a collectible item. Great cup. And Leonardo was still behind him, making his skin prickle nervously, and he just wouldn't give up.

"Where's the Dasani?" he asked, feeling himself begin to ramble, "God, I hate tap water, it's got all that metal…stuff. You know, that metal kind of stuff with the aftertaste. They need to do something about that."

Leonardo, who couldn't let a horrible train wreck go to save his soul, continued. "You said last night you wanted to…" he trailed off and Michelangelo had the fleeting hope that he'd never finish the sentence. Then he picked it up again, determined to continue the world's worst moment, "You said that you wanted me-"

Michelangelo slammed the cup down because he felt that if he actually heard his brother finish that statement, something horrible would happen.

"Shut up! Shut up about that!" he spun around to face his brother, "Just forget it, okay? Forget about it. I was lying. I wanted you out of my room and off my back about all this training stuff, so I just made up the biggest, craziest freakin' thing I could think of. And there, I guess it worked! Congratulations, it's over, just don't talk about that again, okay?"

His breath was coming in funny panicked gasps and he felt for a second that maybe that excuse would work, maybe they could just shrug it off and work from there and never talk about any of this ever, for the rest of his life.

Leonardo was silent for a while and he turned back to grab a bottled water from the fridge, hoping to reach the record time for getting a late-night drink.

"Mikey, I heard you last night. After you told me."

'I heard you', and he didn't have to say what he'd heard him doing. Crying. He'd heard him ripping himself apart with stupid muffled sobbing, and the first thought that came to mind was: '_well, why didn't you come and say something? why couldn't you have just told me to forget it?_' And then he realized that he probably hadn't wanted to come near him, let alone touch him last night.

Leonardo was still leaning against the counter, probably watching him like he was an enemy about to make an unexpected attack. He'd come down intent on talking to him, but obviously not wanting to, on edge and cautious and careful with him like he'd never been before. It made him feel sick, made him want to scream at him that he wasn't going to touch him or even look at him if that wasn't what he wanted. Who'd asked him to listen in on his emotional breakdowns, anyway?

Suddenly he couldn't stand being trapped in the kitchen with him, with the feeling of that new tension pressing in on him.

"I'm gonna- I gotta go," he muttered, knocking the still-closed bottle of water on its side in his rush and ignoring Leonardo saying his name, calling him back.

In his room, he still felt trapped.

* * *

It was a few days, then a week, then two weeks, and Leonardo still hadn't talked to him again. 

Well, he had, it wasn't like his brother had become a stone wall of silence or something. And it wasn't as if they ever had deep conversation anyway, not like the kind Leo would have with Donatello or the alternately teasing or tension-edged ones he had with Raphael.

It was just that Michelangelo just didn't do serious conversations very well, and those were the kind that Leonardo tended to enjoy having. Philosophical-type ones about life, the universe, and everything that made his head hurt with all the psychobabble and wise old saying-talk. It wasn't that he couldn't understand it if wanted to, it was more the fact that it didn't necessarily apply to him, and he was a live in the moment type guy who didn't try to think of the deeper meaning in life or stress too much about big questions like 'what is my purpose', 'why am I here?', and 'what is the sound of one hand clapping?'

So, when it did come up, he tuned out and let the words wash over him. It didn't matter. When Leonardo was starting in on one of his infamous lectures on honor or family, it wasn't as though he asked for feedback, anyway. He was just talking at people, and Michelangelo had the listening thing down well enough. Or at least the 'look like you're listening' thing down well enough.

Right now he felt he could really muster up the concentration to actually pay attention to one of those never-ending speeches if Leonardo could just try to talk to him aside from saying calm, boring things like: "You need to adjust your angle on that attack," and, "Good morning."

They used to talk a lot more, he remembered, they all had, before Donatello went off into the great world of technology and he couldn't understand him half the time, and Leonardo sort of froze into his responsible leader job. Conversations now went either to super-casual, which he could do, and super-serious, which he could only smile and nod to.

They used to _play _a lot more, and to Michelangelo, it was when they were just chilling out or playing ninja-version of Capture the Flag, or just going into hardcore gaming session on the couch, that everything kind of clicked. Like they were all together and everything was going to be okay, they felt connected like beads on a string.

To him, it wasn't the same when they were in a fight, because then it was sort of a hard, gut-instinct synchronization. Not that blissful, 'all's right with the world' comfort.

Not like it was when he was joking around with Leonardo when he was getting too serious, or play-fighting when sometimes he unwound enough to join in, or just hanging out and showing off skateboard tricks to him, that was when he felt that big 'connection' thing that Leo sometimes talked about.

Now all that was pretty much shot to hell, with Leonardo trying not to come too close to him and Michelangelo staying off to one side so he didn't have to see what his brother's reaction would be if he did get into the personal space bubble. He didn't want to look in his eyes and see disgust there again.

The others noticed, of course, since they weren't being anywhere near subtle with the mutual silent treatment. Donatello took him aside a few times while he was watching him work on something complicated and full of wires, and tried to get him to talk to him about what was happening with Leonardo.

"I won't say that I blame him for being angry at you," he said, the slim handle of some kind of miniature screwdriver between his fingers, tapping against his wrist, "You were very careless. _Too _careless, and you tend to have those accidents a lot, and you're really starting to worry everyone."

Michelangelo stared at him dumbly, not sure what kind of response was required here.

That seemed to strike a bad chord with Donatello, he narrowed his eyes and his next comment had the sharp edge of frustration. "There, that's precisely what I'm talking about. It's like you don't even notice how you've been affecting everyone! You've been sulking around for weeks and weeks, and whenever anyone tries to talk to you, you just say you're okay, when it's completely obvious that you're not. I don't think you've even been playing video games lately."

"Yeah, it's the end of the world when I stop playing Kirby," Michelangelo said, "Maybe next I'll go off the deep end and start playing chess or something."

Donatello's mouth quirked sharply downwards and he set down the screwdriver with a sharp and forceful click. "Don't joke about this, Mikey. I'm completely serious, and I'm not in the mood to have you turn this into some kind of witty banter competition. I just told you I'm _worried_ about you, doesn't that penetrate your skull at all? I'm worried because you're starting to remind me of how Leo acted after that battle with the Shredder, and I don't want to see you go through the same problems. Not to mention that none of us have any clue why you're going through this…phase, since you haven't so much as spoken to anyone. You can't see how strange that is for you?"

He tried to force a smile through the guilt pangs. "You mean usually I can't keep my mouth shut?" It came out sounding a lot more bitter than it did light and casual, and he moved away. "I'm just…I can't say anything, all right?" his voice rose on a slightly hysterical note, "I'm sorry about you guys. I'm sorry about everything."

"Well, sorry isn't going to help any of it go away, Mikey!" Donatello's voice went whiplash-sharp for an instant before he took a breath and seemed to try to settle back down, his hand going back for the screwdriver. "Sorry isn't going to help us when you make more mistakes when it's most important. I know you don't feel great about what happened, but unless you do something to change it, you're just going to slide back into the same pattern."

"You sound just like Leo," he muttered, feeling resentful and nervous all at the same time.

Donatello turned to look at him more closely. "What did you say to Leo?" he asked.

Michelangelo faltered for a second, then decided to be deliberately obnoxious. "I told him that I was thinking of getting a _sex change_," he said with a grin, then stood up and got out of there as quickly as possible, not listening to his brother's outraged comments as he left.

At dinner that night he picked at his food and ended up throwing half of it away after spending most of the evening using stealthy ninja sleight of hand tricks to make it look like his food was disappearing into his mouth instead of into the folded napkin in his lap.

When he left, Donatello and Leonardo were having one a quietly and intensely angry conversation, hushed whispers rising and falling sharply. 'That's it,' he thought, 'he's going to tell him', but even panic was beginning to feel dull now, like someone dipped his emotions in Novocain and they were all coming from far away. He figured that was fine.

* * *

"…Look, it's got to stop. You know, I don't care whatever it is that happened wit' you and Mikey, but this crap has gotta stop. This is just freakin' stupid now, okay? He's not talking to me, you're not talking to him…just go and tell him it's okay about the mission thing, if that's what this is about. You and your Fearless Leader training whacko program is gonna drive him nuts." 

Raphael was pacing in front of a very stone-still Leonardo, who had his arms crossed and looked ready to take down a force of nature. An angry Raphael probably qualified as one.

"I told you it has nothing to do with that," Leonardo said in the level, overly-patient tone that came across as anything but calm. His fingers twitched and dug into the side of his arm and Michelangelo, watching silently from the shadows at the top of their staircase, suppressed a wince.

"Well, yeah, that's what you said. But then you kinda stopped there, when it'd be really great to know why you've been ignoring him. Heck, just a few weeks ago you were practically on his ass every day, and now it's like you don't even want to see him!" Raphael threw his arms up in the air in a sweeping gesture of confusion.

Leonardo was silent.

Michelangelo wondered if he should go down the stairs to help, but then there would be the hugely awkward realization of 'oh great, he was listening to us fight about him' to deal with, and also he knew that Leo didn't need any help with this fight. After all, it wasn't like Raphael had him trapped against his own bedroom wall or anything.

Meanwhile, the argument downstairs was escalating. Raphael was getting into the 'invasion of personal space' shouting range, up in Leonardo's face and jabbing a finger at him. "And then you're still not talking to me about it, or Don about it, and of course neither is Mikey. Not to us, anyway, but you're no help. Goddammit, it's like you two took a big oath of silence, but whatever it's about, it's close to _killin_' Mikey. What the hell is your problem, anyway? Have you looked at him lately? Or are ya too busy ignoring him to bother?"

At that, Leonardo jerked forward as if he was going to grab or shove Raphael, a fluid, violent movement that he checked almost as quickly. "I already told you I can't talk about any of this with you," he finally said, his voice on the barely restrained edge of furious, "It's- I can't help, alright? I tried, and I don't think- There's nothing. And if he's not trusting you, then I can't break that. It's something personal."

"Yeah, but all that ain't gonna help him if it keeps making him go crazy!" Raphael yelled. "And now you're goin' in on us telling us to leave him alone about it! Jeez, one of these days he's gonna…"

At that point Michelangelo crept back into his room, hearing their voices raise behind him. He felt uncomfortable and weighted with the guilt of being the cause of all of that friction, and at the same time unable to help without causing even more. It just felt like everyone was falling away now, like he was some kind of anti-magnet and everything he got near was flung far off to the distance.

* * *

It didn't really help talking to Donatello about it, either, since he'd gotten very high-strung and upset about something. (All right, he had to admit that the 'something' was most likely the new stretch of silence between him and Leonardo.) 

He used to hang out near Donatello when he was working on his various pursuits into the realm of science, since there was a therapeutic level of boringness in all of his technical work. He'd never told him that one, obviously, since that would probably result in his brother railing at him about the benefits of a scientific education and how a mind was a terrible thing to waste. And honestly he didn't want the explosion now, with Donatello looking so like a tightly-wound spring. When Don exploded, it tended to be spectacular.

Still he tried a little, lingering near his computers and sitting close enough to watch and yet still be pretty much out of sight. He'd sit on the stairs and watch Raphael beat the crap out of the punching bag, or hang around cautiously where Master Splinter did his meditation, watching him take easy breaths and feeling comforted by the scent of the incense he always used. It was comfortable to be near them, but too close to them and they'd try to talk or get him to do something: video games, biking, scavenging at the dump. He'd never wanted to sit still as much as he did now.

He stayed furthest from Leonardo, trying not to watch him or look at him or ask him, like he used to, to come with him aboveground to just run around and hang out.

Donatello snapped at him once when he caught him out of the corner of his eye. He'd been working on soldering something, and the flame jerked dangerously near his hand as he twitched in surprise. "Jeez, Mikey!" he said furiously, setting the tool down on the table and looking at him with a strangely fierce expression, "What's wrong with you? Can you attempt to _not_ lurk in the shadows like a ghost?"

"I thought you didn't want me bothering you when you were working," he said, since it was a perfectly good explanation of this new bizarre behavior.

It didn't go over all that well. "Yes, but I don't want you looming like a deranged assassin in the dark, either," Donatello said, "Why don't you go and watch TV instead? You _used_ to hang around and act like a normal person, instead of The Phantom."

"What, didn't you tell me a while ago that I was getting on your nerves? Now you're upset because I'm not trying to touch your fancy toys? That makes, like, zero sense."

"Whatever, Mikey," Donatello said with a sharp exhalation of breath, turning back to the circuitry on the desk. The soldering torch flicked back on and he returned to his careful work. "It's no good talking to you, anyway."

He wanted to say he was sorry, but the hint of his nightmares kept coming back and whispering '_it's no good if you're not going to change because of it_.' Instead, he went to his room and just lay down on the floor and hovered, for a while, in and out of sleep. That worked for a while, he wasn't bothering anyone, he didn't have to look at anyone and worry, he wasn't feeling anything.

The stars on his ceiling glowed very dimly in the faint illumination his desk lamp was giving the room, and he just lay there and counted them and recounted and thought of absolutely nothing until Master Splinter called for him to come to practice.

* * *

Leonardo tried to approach him again, this time quiet and careful. He tried to talk about how he looked, of all things, said he looked pale lately, or thin, or maybe both. He'd wanted to laugh about that, because pale and thin was kind of how he _felt_. 

Michelangelo felt himself pushing Leonardo away, because after all he couldn't care about him after that. He was just obligated now, and he couldn't stand the empty fakeness of it now. No jokes, no teasing, no comfort, only distance and instructions, and that wasn't enough. Sometimes he wanted to grab hold of Leo and beg that he make everything better, that he fix it, that was what Leo _did_…but the urges came less and less now.

Fighting went by quickly, partly but not only because of his dropping skills. He fought silently, not feeling the spark, the energy like fizz in soda rising in him like it used to during a good fight. Now it was like his whole body was just…lagged, deadweight, heavy like someone stuffed him with wet rags. Sparring went formulaic and sloppy, with him fighting to get it over with and not to win. What was the point?

His mind told him that it probably mattered an awful lot if he was fighting on of the Foot or the various other nefarious baddies out to get them. The part of his mind that was scaring him a lot lately said that maybe it was okay for him to lose one day, and make everyone a little happier. Lately it felt like those little dark pieces of his mind, (like soul cockroaches,) were just swallowing him up. Master Splinter had looked at him one afternoon as he tried to reach a trancelike state, fumbling for peace of mind and failing, and sighed.

"My son, I sense that you have an imbalance of the spirit that blocks you. Whatever the cause is, it is deep, and it twists your emotions and heart like a vine strangles a tree. Whatever this strife is within you, you must resolve it, or it will tear you from within. Wounds of the soul are not as easy to heal as wounds of the body."

At that moment he'd almost spilled everything, wanting to be like a little kid again with a scrape on his knee, running to his father to make it all better. He grabbed Splinter's hand and forced it down, swallowing it back. "I can't-" he'd said quietly, "I…not yet."

"You can not wait forever to be helped, Michelangelo."

Forever looked like it was the most likely option at this point.

Michelangelo stood on the practice mats and barely dodged a punch aimed at his stomach, turned and kicked up, hard and swift.

Not swift enough, Raphael intercepted his kick at shoulder level, grabbed him by the ankle, and flipped him over on the mat hard enough to knock the air out of him. He gasped, scrabbled for a second on the smooth fabric, and then Raphael's foot on his shell pinned him down, pressing him firmly into the mat. Before, he knew he probably would have been able to roll out easily enough, it wasn't as if he was even using his full weight to keep him down.

With all the energy drain and the lack of interest in eating or being energetic or really anything, he'd fallen back on strategy, which was no match for skill and strength. For a second he felt a surge of anger about it all: how stupid, this totally _sucked_, he looked like a complete idiot and he could barely even take care of himself in a stupid sparring match.

Then it all slipped away, leaving him with that strange hollow feeling of uncaring that had become the norm lately. "Let me up," he said with no intonation at all, and Raphael cursed under his breath and removed his foot.

They got into their stances, circling each other for a few minutes. Michelangelo rushed forward, misjudged his next attack, and instead caught him a glancing blow on the shoulder.

In return, Raphael hooked his ankle in his leg and tripped him, sending him to the mat again. He rolled this time, trying to kick out while on the floor, but Raphael dodged it and pinned him, raising a fist and ending the swift punch downwards before it connected.

He sort of sat there for a while, looking furious, his fist hovering an inch above Michelangelo's face. It was worrying, but he felt like he was watching himself go through these exercises from a far-off vantage point somewhere off in space. Probably being subtly threatened by Raphael would have made him freak out a couple months ago, but now he found himself almost accepting the blow.

It never came. His brother put his fist down and made one of his grunts that sounded like he should be swearing, and got off of him. "What's the point?" he muttered to himself under his breath, something Michelangelo figured he wasn't meant to hear. He wondered why, since it was probably the truth.

Raphael threw him a bottle of water, and he caught it and looked at it blankly, remembering the last talk with Leo in the kitchen. It might have been at least a month ago now. He felt a painful prickling at the back of his throat and he set the bottle down.

"You wanna go up topside and get some ice cream or something'?" Raphael asked

"Not hungry," he replied. He hadn't been hungry in a long time.

Another of those unintelligible growling sounds, and suddenly Raphael stepped up to him. "Look, Mikey, I ain't Don, and I don't got any idea how to say this right, okay? But you're not alright. You're acting…like you're dead, and it's kind of scaring everybody. So why don't you _talk_ to us? Hell, you haven't been talking to anyone at all, you know that? None of your bonehead jokes or your annoying pranks, and that's just not like you! It's like something went and sucked out your soul!"

Michelangelo looked at Raphael, looking fierce with worry, like he was ready to go on and find whatever the problem was and kill it with his bare hands. He looked away. "Yeah, dude. You're right. I got a problem. But it's not, well, it's not something that you can help with."

"Why not?" Raphael almost roared, startling him, "I don't know what's goin' on with everyone here! All of a sudden, you start mopin' around, then Leo starts going and withholding information, so I don't know why he's upset and your upset, and Donnie…he's just lookin' at everyone like freakin' Armageddon is coming, and I don't GET IT! What the hell is up with everyone?"

He was on his feet before he realized it, feeling like he was backing away under assault. "Stop yelling at me!" he said, wanting to either run or just start ripping apart everything in the room, "I don't know! I don't! I can't do anything about it, okay? I tried, but I can't!" Michelangelo couldn't look at Raphael with his angry-concerned face, or at Donatello, who was looking over from the computers with a sick expression, and he couldn't find anything else to look at, he squeezed his eyes shut miserably.

His mind raced from one emotion to the other, anger, rage, empty, hollow, hopeless…back to anger again. Raphael put his hand on his shoulder and he wanted to slap it aside and run out.

"Sorry," Raphael said, "I, uh, sorry for pushing ya like that." He still looked frustrated and half-crazy with wanting to make it better, but the anger was gone.

"Yeah," he said, for lack of anything else to say. Wanting to hold him, to reach out for some physical affection, but for some reason he felt as though he could break himself doing it.

"We can still, you know, go topside if you want," his brother added, looking desperate for something to do.

Then Leonardo stepped into the room, arms at his sides and looking like he was bracing for a fight. "No, he can't," he said.

* * *

He should have seen it coming. 

So Leonardo came in and laid down the iron fist of the Law, and it went that he was no longer allowed to go aboveground for training runs or pleasure spins or whatever. It made sense, the way he put it. Well, it wasn't just the way he put it, it just made sense anyway, because he was right: Michelangelo was no longer able to defend himself well enough to be safe aboveground. As an incompetent fighter, he would only prove himself a liability to the team.

Anything could happen, and all sorts of dangerous things tended to be attracted to them all the time. So, Foot ambushes or Purple Dragons or insane government employees could attack them, and they couldn't be held up trying to compensate for his mistakes. They couldn't be allowed to be distracted if he needed saving. All of that made perfect and logical sense, and of course it would, it was coming from Leonardo.

He just happened to _hate_ it.

It wasn't even that he wanted very badly to go aboveground, or really anywhere else anymore. Usually he felt too out of it to do anything but lounge around in his room trying to think of something to do, ignoring the fact that he hadn't bothered to touch anything recreation-related in ages. While that was depressing, it wasn't as though anyone was imposing limits on him. The door was still open to leave, to escape, to get out of the Lair and away from…well, from everyone.

"You can still visit Casey and April at the store," Leonardo added somewhat lamely. They all knew that Michelangelo hadn't spoken much to Casey since his brothers had set him up as having a crush on him, and he hadn't been on anything more than politely friendly terms with April since then. She'd smile nervously, like she was waiting for him to make the first move in opening up, and he couldn't find himself able to speak. He didn't blame her anymore. He wasn't angry. He just couldn't talk to anyone the same as he had before.

Michelangelo felt he was beginning to know what claustrophobics felt like.

He knew it wasn't because Leonardo was being spiteful or anything, he was supposed to be their fearless team leader and all, doing what was best for the family. That also made sense. He knew why he was doing it, it just made him angry, made him want to scream at him 'why are you doing this to me?' But he knew if he didn't, he'd melt down, go crazy, and maybe even scream out everything at the top of his lungs.

These days it felt like he was a water balloon someone stuck with a pin, and everything was leaking out of him under his own pressure. He couldn't explode. He was falling apart at the seams.

Turned out he didn't have to say anything, Raphael stepped forward protectively. "What, are you just trying to get him out of your sight now, is that it?" he accused, looking ready to take his aggression out on someone, and Leonardo was typically good for that.

"Raph, don't twist this around," Leonardo snapped, "You know we can't have him out on the missions. It's not like I want to leave him-"

Raphael jumped in without letting him finish the sentence, "You know, I'm gonna have a hard time believing that! I mean, it's not like you've Mr. Friendly to him lately. Hell, you guys barely look at each other! And now you don't want him goin' up with us? What're you doing now, telling him he ain't welcome anymore?"

Leonardo shoved Raphael so hard he stumbled back, nearly falling onto the practice mats, and stood with a bright and angry gleam in his eyes. "Don't you dare accuse me of doing that, Raph. Don't you dare accuse me of using my position to do anything against one of my brothers. You don't know anything about it, so don't talk about what you don't understand!"

Michelangelo grabbed Raphael before he made a move against Leonardo, latching onto his shoulder. "It doesn't matter!" he said, "Look, I can just stay inside and practice some more or something. Who cares if I can go out anymore or not? Who _cares,_" he continued, anger adding an extra harshness to his voice, "It's not like you guys needed me anyway, right?"

"Mikey," Leonardo said, sounding pleading and angry at once, "You know that's not it. It's not about that, you know-"

"I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING!" he screamed at him, and he felt Raphael move away in shock as his voice broke, "Does that make you happy? I don't know! And I can't, I can't…" his throat closed up, choking off his words.

Raphael shrugged off Michelangelo's hand and started moving towards Leonardo aggressively. "Now look at what you-"

What could have been a huge fight was interrupted by Donatello slamming a book on the table with enough force to make it sound like a gunshot.

They all turned to stare at him, shocked.

It was strange, Michelangelo had been expecting to see him upset, furious enough with them to lose his temper. He hadn't expected the wild panic behind the anger.

"What is wrong with all of you?" Donatello asked, his arms sweeping out in a wild gesture to indicate the whole scene, "Can't you do something else other than fight about it?" His voice raised until he was almost yelling, that strange fear in his voice as well as in his eyes.

Master Splinter spoke into the silence that followed. None of them had even noticed him watching.

"Donatello is right," he said, gripping his walking stick tightly, "I will not have my sons behave in such a way towards each other. There is no need for such hostility." he turned slightly, "Leonardo, Michelangelo, I must speak with you. Alone."

* * *

Michelangelo was afraid, of course. But then, being afraid had become so part of his mental state that it was almost unnoticed. The rush of emotions had swept away quickly as a candle flame being extinguished, leaving him with nothing but a colder, emptier kind of feeling. The old him would have been terrified of it. The _new_ him was barely enough of a person to feel terrified of anything. 

He bowed his head when Splinter's eyes met his, and waited.

"The two of you have been at odds with each other," his father began, "And I do not know the cause of it. Don't try to deny it," he added as Michelangelo opened his mouth to try and explain it away, "There is a rift that has formed between the two of you."

Splinter paused and looked at them both, waiting for a response. Leonardo looked tight-lipped and that look that seemed like he was waiting for the floor beneath him to tip unpredictably was back on his face. He didn't speak.

"I had thought that the two of you together would be able to solve whatever problem is at the root of this," Master Splinter continued after it was clear neither of them were going to offer a comment.

"You have never had this much friction in your relationship, and I assumed this, being the first real problem the two of you have had, could be solved by you alone without my intrusion. Instead, it has begun to fester in silence, and your brothers have been affected by your problems."

"I am sorry, sensei," Leonardo said, looking down at the floor. His hands were clenched in fists on his knees.

Michelangelo made a kind of apologetic noise and continued waiting for the guillotine to drop.

"It is always distressing for members of a family to see each other in pain. And there is pain in this, I know, because neither of you show any ire towards each other. You are not fighting so much as you are avoiding a source of mutual unhappiness. And there is some wall between you that is stopping you from dealing with your problems together. Instead, you stay isolated."

Splinter looked down and for a moment he looked old, and tired, and confused. "I have watched you, my sons, in your struggle, and have not intervened because you have made it clear that what has happened between you is personal. However, I ask you to remember that watching you both, especially you, Michelangelo, worries the whole family."

Michelangelo shifted guiltily.

"Leonardo," Master Splinter turned to him, 'Your decision to keep your brother away from the surface world in his current state was a wise one, and the correct one to make as the leader of your brothers. But also, it was not done well. Instead of announcing it as you did, you should have come to Michelangelo personally and spoke with him. As a leader, it is also your task to aid the members of your family who need your help."

"Yes, Master Splinter." He looked blank, accepting, but his hands clenched more tightly as he spoke.

"It's not his fault," Michelangelo said, feeling as though he should say it, "It's, I started it. We talked about it, though," he added a little vindictively, "It was a _great_ talk. In fact, it was such a great talk that we haven't needed to say anything else afterwards."

Leonardo was looking at him, he felt it, but he didn't meet his eyes.

"I'm sorry," he said eventually, "I have to go…throw up or something."

He got up and left, Master Splinter calling his name and Leonardo trying to catch up to him. He got close enough to grab his shoulder and Michelangelo jerked at the touch and spun around. "Why don't you go tell him?" he demanded angrily, "Just go and make it easier for yourself, won't you? It's not like you care about me, anyway!" His stomach twisted painfully at the thought as the words left his mouth.

He shoved him off and sprinted to the door out of the lair.

"You're not allowed-" Leonardo started behind him.

"I'm gonna go get lost in the sewers. Is that alright with you?" he said, pressing the button that made the doors slide open, "That should just about make everyone's day."

To his surprise, a mile or so away from the Lair, he knelt by a wall and actually did start puking his guts out. There wasn't much of anything in his stomach to vomit up, so it was done fairly quickly. When the dry-heaving stopped, he just stayed there feeling weak and shaking, like he'd just ejected more than the contents of his stomach. Everything was spinning crazily and he knew he had no fever, so he couldn't be sick anywhere _but_ in the head. Of course he was completely insane, who in their right mind would be sitting alone in a cold, wet sewer, puking all over the place when they could be sitting at home making everyone miserable? He laughed and it scared him how it sounded, harsh and brittle, like it could cut something.

_Is it possible to just die from being crazy? Like, not killing yourself dying, but just one day becoming so completely beyond the bend insane your body gets too sick to handle it and just dies? _

The thought froze him in place because right then it felt so possible, so definite, because that seemed like the only right conclusion to all of this. And he still wanted Leo, and what did that say about him? He still wanted something that was probably going to kill him.

* * *

Days blurred through each other, not leaving an impact on his life. His time was no longer broken up by training runs or crazy nighttime fiascos aboveground, so everything just blended into one boring schedule: meditation, sparring, eat, (not anymore, he could barely keep down his food), sleep, feed Klunk. Klunk had taken to winding around his ankle, mewing piteously for attention he usually felt too tired to give. 

Sleep dominated his days and his thoughts, dulling everything into monochromatic, headache greys.

One day he just decided that he didn't want to bother writing anymore, or drawing, and his pencils collected dust on the desk with his comics. He'd slid everything into organized piles one day, too bored to do anything but something mechanical like this, something he didn't need to think for and would keep him from slipping into deep thought, and now his room looked more or less like a storage cabinet.

He didn't care.

Michelangelo thought maybe he could just close his eyes and wake up where he'd never loved Leonardo to begin with.

* * *

They practiced partnered fighting one day, each of them picking up the other and performing a complicated flip-and-attack routine that he vaguely remembered using against some Foot once. When Leonardo lifted him off the floor, he felt him jolt in shock before dropping him to the mats. 

He apologized right afterward and picked him up again, but Michelangelo wondered about the strange, hard look in his eyes when they practiced together. He kept wondering right through practice and later when he sprawled out on his bed, dimly miserable and staring blankly at the month-old bag of Oreos that had probably gone stale by now.

He kept on wondering right up until the door flew open and Leonardo stormed in like the wrath of gods, looking prepared to take down armies.


	8. right back to where we started from

**Growing Pains and Orange Bitters**

**Chapter Eight**: _right back to where we started from_

By: Serendipity

**Author's Note**: Mea culpa, people, I know this update has been a very slow one. I can't really explain why, since it was this agglomeration of a whole bunch of different Issues, final exams and holiday craziness. And then there was nothing but horribly crippling writer's block, where I couldn't even type a sentence. It was lunacy. It was pandemonium.

All of this BACKTRACKED ME HORRIBLY. But not irreparably, because I tried to stick to my guns on this one. Please hold off on those garrotes, okay?

* * *

The door made a loud clattering sound as it bounced against the frame, and Michelangelo had the brief and completely irreverent thought of installing a 'have respect for doors' sign before the expression on Leonardo's face made him realize that whatever was about to follow was going to be huge. It occurred to him that if Leonardo could breathe fire, he'd be doing it now. He had that sort of deeply angry pose, fists clenched at his side, like he was containing a whole pressure cooker full of grievances. 

"What in the hell are you doing?" Leonardo nearly hissed, looking like he had just hit one of his breaking points and was now just decompressing a lot of stress by having a fit.

Michelangelo just sat there, struck momentarily dumb with shock. _Don't move_, he thought with lightheaded sarcasm, _he can smell your fear_. Not sure of what to do, he just stared at his brother who was standing just inside the doorframe, glaring daggers at him and his room in general and basically giving the impression that they had all done something to offend him on a visceral level.

This was something new, especially since he couldn't remember doing anything to bring down Leonardo's heavenly wrath. It wasn't as if he was being overly-active. He hadn't left the lair, he hadn't even spoken to anyone much lately. Hell, he'd damn near been a recluse. Was it too much to ask to just be left alone?

It was tempting to ask Leonardo if he'd had his vision checked if he couldn't see that he was lying down, in his room, alone. Then again, he didn't think confronting this with sarcasm would be an overly-wise idea, since Leo looked quite ready to eat his face.

"…I'm resting," he said eventually, "Sorry, I didn't know that was a problem. What's wrong, am I late for dinner?"

Leonardo made a sound like a cross between a growl and a snort. "Why do you care?" he demanded, sounding annoyed, "It's not like you're going to eat it, anyway!"

This was unexpected enough to make him snap out of his stupor. He jerked involuntarily at the accusation and gaped at Leonardo, his mouth probably slack-jawed and stupid.

Michelangelo abandoned caring about that sort of thing for the more pressing matter of Leonardo actually being in his actual room and accusing him of…stuff that was totally true. It _was _true, he hadn't been eating as much, but it wasn't like it was his business. It wasn't like he could just go ahead and have _another_ 'Let's Corner Mikey In His Room' confrontation just like that. And who did he think he was, barging in on him like he was some stupid little kid?

Oh, right. He _did _think he was just a stupid little kid. Silly of him to forget it.

Leonardo looked like he'd seen some of that indignation in Michelangelo's eyes, because he backed up a step and put his hand over his forehead. He looked like he did directly after one of his worse fights with Raphael, stressed-out and frustrated and unsure, for once, what to do.

"Sorry, I…let's start this over again," Leonardo said, sounding hesitant.

Michelangelo went for a bright smile and realized it probably came across as a grimace instead. "Alright. Here's how sane people decide to start conversations! They say: 'Hello, how are you this evening?' Of course, they also knock on the door before coming in, because that's just the polite thing to do. Like I've, y'know, SAID. Many times before. Maybe I should put a lead weight or something up there as a security measure!"

It was distinctly possible that he was harping a bit too much on the door knocking issue. He felt probably it was because, as far as issues went, this was a safe one. It wasn't horrible, uncomfortable, or a source of gaping voids of uncomfortable silence between him and Leo. It wasn't something that he'd cringe over discussing, and it looked like Leonardo was about to start something that would have him alternating between cringing and mentally breaking down. Again.

Also, truth be told, he really was getting tired of people ignoring the existence of the big wooden door and just plunging through it like it didn't fucking exist. Maybe he should have gotten deadbolts installed. As ninjas, it wouldn't stop his brothers, but it might just make them stop to think that he was sitting in his room, obviously wanting to be left alone. Or it could possibly cause someone to break an arm as they tried to barge in.

This didn't seem like a wholly unpleasant idea.

Meanwhile, Leonardo looked a little less upset, but only in the tightly-wound-spring way that meant he'd just tucked all of it down so as to be in proper form when he entered lecture mode.

It was a little too quiet just outside the door. "Where is everyone else?" he asked.

"I told them to leave us alone," Leonardo said quietly, a line that was too easily taken out of context and made him shudder for a second before slamming himself back to reality.

He couldn't help feeling like the walls were closing in.

"Look," Leonardo started over, "You're not eating. Don't argue with me on that," he added more sharply when Michelangelo looked up and opened his mouth to retort, "You're…you're way too light. I can't believe you've been doing this to yourself. What were you thinking? How could you even think this is going to help anything?"

"I don't know. Maybe I figured if I didn't have food in my stomach I didn't have to puke up as much?" Michelangelo said sharply, settling into a crouch that he could easily spring up from if he wanted to get up and bolt. Leonardo noticed and shifted into a more solid stance, making it clear that he would block any attempts to flee.

"It's not like I'm doing this on purpose," Michelangelo added, ignoring him, "Not any of it. I'm not eating so much because I'm not hungry. People don't eat when they're not hungry, okay? And when I do…it chokes me going down. I just can't swallow it." The word 'swallow' seemed to trigger him into actually swallowing, convulsively, like he was taking in something rotten.

He looked up, narrowing his eyes. "You think I like it? Oh wait, of course you do. You probably still think I'm just doing this to hog the limelight, right? This is all some kind of huge family publicity stunt, and it's not a big problem to me, and it's not like any of it is actually real, right? Because I'm just your _stupid_ kid brother, playing a _stupid_ attention game."

His voice had started out toneless as it usually was lately, but as he went on the volume crept up as the strange, sullen anger in the pit of his stomach that he'd been lugging around with him began to show itself.

"That's not-" Leonardo started, defensive and upset, and Michelangelo drove right over him in his need to get everything out.

"It IS," he shouted, "That's exactly what it is, or else you wouldn't be doing this!" he waved an arm as if to take in the entire scene, "Jesus, what do you think you are, my dad? Are you going to ground me or something? AGAIN? Do you think it's okay to just corner me in my room whenever you need me to talk?"

"Well, yeah, actually," Leonardo replied sharply, "Seeing that you keep on blowing me off every time I try to sit down and talk to you about this. I tried, but you keep running away from me, and I can't just- you know I can't just let you keep this up! It's not healthy what you're doing to yourself!"

Michelangelo bolted to his feet and to the floor, causing Leonardo to stiffen and shift to a more defensive pose, awaiting an attack or an escape attempt. "Healthy?" he spat out, and there was more bitterness in his voice than he ever thought he was capable of having, "_I'm_ not healthy, bro!" he jabbed a finger at his chest so hard it felt like he'd jammed it against metal, "I haven't been for months! So maybe it's not like cancer or anything, but it's not any way right, and you know it, so why does it matter what's going on with me not eating? Like that's even the biggest of my problems now!"

"I'm not just going to fall back into that 'little brother' groove whenever you snap your fingers! What the hell is wrong with you, do you think everything I think is just so shallow you can just TALK it away? Well, fuck you! You can't be bothered to talk to me anymore, not in any way that matters, so why do you get to storm in here and decide to fix me on _your_ terms? You can't even look at me any more, unless I'm not looking at you! Congratulations for finally noticing something about me!"

Any further and he might go too far. Michelangelo halted, cutting himself off mid-rant. "It doesn't matter, okay? Why don't you try to feed me from a little pipe, since you're going all the way and trapping me in here?"

Leonardo frowned, but he could read the hurt behind it and hated him for it, for barging into his room and yelling at him and then having the audacity to make him feel bad for yelling back. This wasn't Leo's fault, this was all such a _mess_, he couldn't stand it. He couldn't stand feeling like an earthquake could happen any minute when he was just talking to him, like just being around him could make the whole world shift.

"I'm not trapping you anywhere," Leonardo said slowly, but didn't back up from his position by the door, "If…if this is about not letting you go aboveground, I'm sorry, but I told you why it was necessary. And it's not just me, Master Splinter wanted it, too. It's not fair for you to do this to me. I can't help it, okay? I need to look out for your best interests, and if they involve keeping you inside so you don't get killed, then that's what I'm going to do!"

"Fine, whatever," Michelangelo said, and turned to look at the wall.

Leonardo grabbed for his shoulder and swung him around to look at him. "No, _not_ whatever!"

Michelangelo stared at him and Leonardo probably saw the indignant warning in his expression, because he dropped his hand from his shoulder and he could see him taking a few mental steps backwards.

"Not whatever," he repeated, "Look, I'm sorry about barging into your room and invading your privacy-"

"Thank you!" Michelangelo snapped sarcastically.

"But," Leonardo continued, stressing the word with enough emphasis to make it sound strange, "When, for the last few times I've tried to talk to you, you just changed the subject in a really obvious way and ran away from me, you should have realized that I was going to have to resort to this at some point."

This was actually true, and a good point. Leonardo had never been the patient and non-aggressively helpful kind, like Donatello, who sat and waited for him to seek him out on his own time, who never pushed a confession and instead gently and expertly nudged words and hurt from whoever he tried to be the confidant for. (_Donatello, he thought, whose patience he had shattered some time ago_. )

Leonardo was just a hopeless steamroller when it came to stuff like this: flattening any opposition with the sheer force of his interrogative attempts to find the problem and solve it. He acted like problems were pressure points: that one quick jab in the right place could take care of everything, and all he needed was to find that one core issue and solve it. Really, he really should have expected him to once again pull his martial law policy of cornering him and demanding, _ordering _that a solution be found.

Of course, he still resented the hell out of it.

He felt his shoulders going straighter, muscles tight with stress. "I'm sorry, I thought that you didn't want to talk to me, with the whole avoidance thing you've been doing."

Leonardo stiffened. "I haven't-"

"Oh, yes, yes you have!" Michelangelo shouted, "Okay, fine, maybe you had like a few attempts at trying to talk this over with me. Great, good for you, you get a cookie for trying to be supportive! But don't think I haven't noticed how you mysteriously aren't around to talk with me or hang out with me or hell, you don't even touch me anymore! You know, it's not contagious, okay? If you hadn't caught it up until now, you're not going to get it. It's not like I'm diseased or something. Or at least, it's not like it's one that's gonna catch. Yeah, thanks a lot for that!"

His fists were curled up so tightly at his sides that he could feel the muscles of his fingers shake with the strain, and he thought that if they kept up like this it all might end right here, that he could do something to make his brother just go away forever. And then what he thought was that the whole thing was like the mother of all déjà vu's, because since when had he ever stopped feeling that way?

And Leonardo was still standing there, waiting and lecturing away, because for some reason he thought this was some kind of personal failing that could be chased from existence by his big brother talk. Michelangelo was getting really sick of this entire big brother talk concept.

"You know," he said suddenly, interrupting Leonardo mid-spiel, "You know something that makes me glad? I'm glad that we're actually naked all the time. It makes things much more interesting. What do you think?"

So it was probably wrong, and it was definitely a really low blow, but he was glad for an instant to see Leonardo completely thrown off stride, shock flashing across his face as he choked and sputtered to a halt. Michelangelo smiled at him cooly and tried to go a step further, brushing his eyes from the bottom of Leonardo's neck and letting his eyes travel downwards, intending to drive him out by disturbing the crap out of him.

All good in theory, but he barely managed to hit even belt level before he caught sight of Leo's expression of total and complete disappointment. He looked like he'd done the night Raphael had been taken and injured: angry and surprised that he was capable of doing something like this. _Be serious_.

It hit him like a sack of ice water to the face, cutting straight through the edges of anger and frustration and dousing him with a horrific sense of shame. Something else hit him a little deeper than skin-level, that if he was going to complain about Leonardo thinking he couldn't take something serious enough, maybe it wasn't the best idea to prove him right. And that on top of the resentment and the emotional backlog of weeks of numb timelessness sent him reeling.

"Never mind," he muttered, and sat down heavily. The beanbag made a wheezing 'whoof' as he sunk into it, the kind of noise that meant he was endangering the seams. "I'm sorry. I'm just…it's so screwed up. This is screwed up. And everything's just wrong right now, and I was…I don't know. Maybe I was waiting for you to fix it."

That made sense to him. Leonardo just _fixed_ things- not like Donatello with wrenches and fine-tuning, or like Raphael, with persistent aggression. Leonardo just seemed to be able to commandeer a situation into turning out okay.

"Look, I'm sorry to have to say this," his brother said finally, into the silence as Michelangelo panted for breath, "And I'm really sorry about, well, I'm sorry that you thought that, that I wasn't going to talk to you again…but you're really being unreasonable."

This was such an unexpected and completely outrageous response that Michelangelo found himself completely unable to do anything but gape and open and close his mouth like a landed fish.

Leonardo took that as an opportunity to continue instead of as an obvious sign that he'd made a blunder. "You can't just tell me something like that and expect me to be totally okay with it right off the bat! You just can't! It's, well, you know how insane and tremendous something like that is? It would be something hard to process even if it _wasn't_ coming from one of my brothers. But the fact that it was you…it was weird, all right? I didn't know how to handle it."

His brother looked sort of abjectly miserable and the look on his face was like the one he had when they were handed fabric to sew, needles and thread, and Leonardo had just stared and fumbled through the pillowcase, loose and clumsy in his hands, needle slipping every stitch. Like what he was holding was delicate and too unfamiliar to predict.

"It doesn't make it any easier for me when you keep walking away," Leonardo added. The sentence was like an outstretched hand, waiting and tentative, and it felt like a 'now or never' moment: take hold of it or lose it forever.

He looked up and felt afraid, because what if pushing him so far away was the only thing that kept him from getting too weird with him, kept him from trying to make his brother go along with whatever it was he was feeling. His old dreams, still too close to the surface, shoved an image of him holding Leo down. _Not that that's going to be a problem with me in this state. If anything, I should worry about falling apart when we start training again._

"It's not going to go away," he said with desperation. "I don't think it can. I don't think you can make it go away, don't you understand?"

They sat there for a few minutes, silently looking at one another, waiting for a first strike.

"Right now," Leonardo said slowly, "How about we work on the problem of you not eating?"

Small steps. He remembered practicing with a _bokuto_ again after the accident, terrified of coming too close, and of Leo, healing cut in plain view, helping him solemnly along each step. Remembered his arm guiding his when it trembled and of Leo finally losing patience enough to rush into a strike, _bokuto_ bouncing harmlessly off the tip of his shell, and yelling at him that he wasn't scared, he wasn't hurt. _I am not afraid._

_He was so, so afraid._

But he said alright anyway, and for the first time in months thought: 'maybe it will be okay'.

* * *

The first thing he tried to eat was one of Leonardo's grilled cheese sandwiches: a little burnt, a little too much butter, and some insta-mix soup that he'd pulled up out of nowhere. Watching him puttering around the kitchen with a sort of grim determination was strange enough, he half expected an apron to materialize from a drawer, probably with the phrase 'obey the chef' on it. There was a comforting sort of homey sound to the sizzling of bread in the frying pan, even if the smell of food now made his stomach turn inside out. 

Leonardo slid the plate and bowl in front of him and plunked down into a chair on the other side of the table, his expression about as grim as it was during a training run, like he was expecting danger to just come crawling from the woodwork. The cement blockwork, really, since this was a sewer. He looked up at him and felt like telling him that he wasn't about to bolt up and run away from his cooking. The remark was on his tongue, but the weight of the confession and the silence kept him from saying it, from trying to fall back into the old groove. Sitting like this with Leo felt almost surreal, like a memory being played out in real-time.

Now why exactly did he think this could be an okay idea instead of an invitation for imminent doom? And what, exactly, was supposed to be happening here? What was he going to say? He longed for a nice boom box or something to fill up the air with music, some kind of background noise. Quiet always made him feel twitchy.

"Go on," Leonardo said impatiently, gesturing at the bowl.

Looking at that gave him something to focus on aside from the hideously awkward situation at hand. Of course, his stomach was just as apathetic to food as it ever was nowadays, so the first bite he took was as mechanical an action as, well, a well-known kata. The first taste of cheese, bread, and the hint of acrid carbonized crust made him almost choke. Amazingly, he managed to swallow without calling up the old gag reflex.

Feeling that some sort of comment was expected, he nodded vaguely, like an idiot. "Uh…thanks," he said, putting the sandwich down. At his brother's look of warning, he grabbed for the soup spoon to indicate that he was still going to be shoving food down his gullet. Soup was easier, liquid, warm, no effort to chew. Just swallowing was more of a passive eating activity, which was just fine with him. After weeks of eating barely anything, his body seemed confused about what to do with the food.

Trying to focus on the simple task of eating became a lot more difficult with such a serious, staring spectator. Leonardo hadn't much moved from where he first sat down, hadn't shifted his crossed arms or even looked away. It was eerily like being stared at by a large turtle-gargoyle. Near-starvation or no, Michelangelo didn't think that kind of surveillance was absolutely necessary.

"Man, I'm gonna have to say this," he said slowly, "But you're kind of creeping me out. Could you not hulk over there like the thing from the black lagoon? It's putting me off my food, which is a shame, because, uh…you want me to eat and all."

This seemed to snap Leonardo out of whatever plane of existence he was inhabiting. "Oh, right," he said slowly. "Sorry."

His brother shifted awkwardly around in his chair and picked up one of Donatello's bits of techno-geekery that he left about the lair. This thing looked like a piece off of a miniature helicopter, and Leonardo looked at it, turning it over in his fingers, before setting it down again.

"I'm not gonna dump this in a nearby plant, if that's what you're worrying about," Michelangelo added, "Look at the scenario here. I'm in a kitchen, sitting at a table, with no nearby empty pots or bowls or even my belt to stick pieces of food in. Yeah, I think it's pretty much covered that everything is going to have to go in my mouth."

He was pretty sure that Leonardo was reacting to the unintentional sour note in his tone when he looked up and snapped out with more than a little frustration: "Yeah, well, that's what I thought every other meal you didn't eat at."

The remark was left hanging in the air for a few minutes. Then Michelangelo exhaled slowly after just realizing that he'd been holding his breath, and Leonardo slumped in his chair and looked like he was ready to have a quiet and painful migraine.

"Alright," Michelangelo said eventually, for the lack of anything better to say, and fiddled with his spoon.

Leonardo stood up abruptly in his chair and went for the fridge, rummaging around until he pulled out one of the bottled energy drinks Raphael usually chugged down in the morning. These were the exact energy drinks that Leonardo usually found completely revolting, so Michelangelo wondered for a few minutes if he was just going to take out some pent-out aggression on the thing.

When Leonardo unscrewed the top and drank from it without really paying attention to what it was, so he figured the assumption could be made that he'd just grabbed the first thing to hand.

He was driving his brother to drink high-protein vegetable beverages. This could only end in tears.

"Look, this whole…this not eating thing. Are you going to tell Master Splinter?" he asked. The idea of his father knowing about it should have filled him with insane amounts of nervous tension. There was some of that, the faint ghost of old emotions, but the most he felt was…strangely displaced, unaffected by it. Like he was watching someone else live his life for him. Until now, he hadn't thought to be disturbed by that.

Leonardo paused mid-sip and gave him a funny look. "I'm sure he knows already," he said slowly.

It took him a moment to understand that completely, surprise hitting him hard as a fist in the stomach. "Really?" he asked, "I mean, are you sure?"

"Yes!" Leonardo said, throwing his arms up in the air in a gesture of hopelessness, "Yes, he knows. You know what else? Don and Raph know you haven't been eating very well, too! You want to know why we all know about this? It's because you look horrible. It's because it's blatantly obvious that the food Master Splinter has been feeding you hasn't so much as touched your stomach, because you're beginning to show signs of _starvation_."

He opened his mouth, wanting to reply to that, but Leonardo began to pace around, gesturing wildly, and he realized that he might have accidentally triggered a rant.

"Did you honestly think that you could go around starving yourself and we'd all be completely oblivious! Don tried to talk to you a week ago, but you weren't even paying attention to him-"

"Wait, no he didn't," Michelangelo blurted, then his mind unpleasantly filled him in on the memory of Donatello trying to get him aside, like he'd done so many times before, and he'd half-listened, ignoring him in favor of the wrestling match playing on the television set, focusing on the wrestlers as they grappled and kicked. He remembered Donatello leaving him eventually, the chair he was sitting on skidding back on the floor with an angry scrape.

"…Oh," he finished quietly.

"Right. _Oh_. You know, okay, at first they thought it was just a part of your depression- yes, they figured out you were depressed, too-"

He let out a small, indignant gasp. "Depressed? I'm not-"

Leonardo ran right over the protest, "Do I have to list some symptoms for you? You're sick. You're sick and upset, and it's understandable and Don and Raph and Master Splinter are all nearly insane with worry trying to understand _why_. Do you know how hard it is, trying to keep something like that from them when you can see that everything they're doing is having zero effect? They've been watching you practically _die_, Michelangelo."

All the time his brother had been talking his voice had gone from the sharp-edged frustration he'd been using to talk to him to a kind of helpless, hopeless desperation, something he'd only heard him use when speaking about battles lost or a life that could have been saved, and it was horrible. It reminded him, for some reason, of seeing Klunk in the snow on Christmas Eve, cold, eyes shut against the ice, his fur slicked down and wet. It was like hearing someone talk about his funeral, and it made him shiver.

The line of Leonardo's shoulders wasn't as straight and solid as it always was as he continued, a little less forcefully. "So, yes, they knew you weren't eating. We just didn't know how bad it was until…too late, I guess. You hid it well, and at the time you were still horrible with practice. I didn't think part of that was a lack of actual nutrition, because I never thought you'd just stop feeding yourself! What were you thinking? Why didn't you think we'd worry? Do you think you live in a _vacuum_, Michelangelo?"

Leonardo threw the question at him like it was a weapon and he floundered stupidly before getting straight on the defensive. "Well, if you all knew so much, why didn't anybody try talking to me sooner?"

That was stupid, a feeble, stupid defense and he knew it the instant the question left his mouth. Leonardo leapt on it, like he usually did when a weak point presented itself.

"Talk to you sooner? Talk to you sooner? We've all been trying to talk to you! Don's been going completely insane trying to figure out ways to slip vitamins in what little food you eat, since talking to you just plain out didn't work. You just start talking about video games that you don't even play anymore! And you never want to come near me, so I'm out completely. Frankly, Raph was going to corner you in the Dojo until I told him to leave it to me." His mouth lifted into a crooked half smile. "I've got more experience cornering people in their rooms."

That was probably all for the better, as Raphael trying to goad him into recovery might just have resulted in a catastrophe. Or yet another brother lost to him- not really as gone from him as he would have expected, really, he corrected. But still, it wasn't the same. He couldn't, _couldn't _take that same disgusted look from Raphael, no matter how much he'd wanted to think it would be better if he just drifted away from everyone.

"Do you have any idea what this has been doing to everybody, Mikey?" Leonardo asked, soft because of the harsh rasp of emotion in his voice and not because he was asking gently.

He shook his head wordlessly, tried not to think of what could happen, what could have happened if he'd managed to slip over the edge and make a mistake, (_why don't you just say die mikey? might have starved yourself and died,_), and he'd have been gone without ever knowing. And his family, he could have left them without even thinking about them, not knowing that they'd known and were hurting, not knowing anything. Story if his life: Michelangelo was a moron who knew nothing.

He felt even more tired than he had before. "Well, I guess…thank you. For, y'know. Not telling about that other thing." he said slowly. Leonardo gave him a long look across the table, his expression composed of more emotions than he could guess at, and nodded.

"Yeah," his brother said after a while, "No problem. Now…just eat some more, would you?"

The soup and sandwich had cooled, the cheese tasted stiff and rubbery when he bit into it, and he almost choked when he swallowed. In the end, he got down about half the grilled cheese and the bowl of soup before the others came back, entering the lair with playful chatter and speculative glances at him in the kitchen.

* * *

The sandwich stayed down for an hour before his stomach twisted in on himself and he found himself retching over the toilet in the bathroom, emptying the contents of his stomach and trying to ignore the angry growlings of Leonardo, who seemed to have appointed himself his watchdog as well as his counselor/mother figure/whatever it was he was trying to do for him. This might have been gratifying if it wasn't so annoying to hear his brother's heated accusations after a full-blown nausea fit. 

So, they tried again. This time, he just drank- milk, and some kind of protein shake that Leonardo probably ripped off from Raphael and his endless supply of weird muscle-builder foods. That was easier, a little, and he drank it with the slow uneasiness that came after a round of sickness: like his stomach was a sleeping animal that could wake up in a tangle of fangs and teeth at any moment. It stayed down, not that he drank that much of it. It wasn't enough, Leonardo still made sure he ate the same meals as the rest of the family, but that never ended up in his stomach for long.

For some time it was like that: he'd eat, his stomach would reject the food. His throat became sensitive and raw from all the acid that was going through it, and Leonardo's solution to the problem was just to try to be more watchful of him, feeding him more after the first wave of nausea. Didn't keep him from choking it up afterwards, and after a couple of days of that, his brother snapped and lost his patience.

He was in his room, cleaning up the mess on the floor with a towel, fighting the urge to pin Leonardo down and just puke him into submission. This was a perfectly normal and understandable desire, in his opinion, because Leonardo had planted himself right there in the doorframe like a well-meaning road block, and because of this he was riding the waves of an anger-ridden 'why won't you do what's best for you' glare. It was beginning to feel like at least one of those glares would end up burning holes in his shell.

Michelangelo turned to glare right back at him, clutching the towel tightly in his fists. "What?" he snapped, "What do you want to say?"

Leonardo let out a sigh that was more of an angry exhalation of breath than anything else. "What do I want to say?" he repeated, and the words had the pressure of carefully-held back anger in them, "I don't know _what_ to say-"

"I'm sure you'll think of something," Michelangelo responded snidely, half-wanting the fight. He was miserable and dizzy and sick of cleaning up his own puke, and for some reason a nice bit of physical violence sounded almost clean. He was tired of this, tired of being weary and not-quite conscious all the time, tired of everything. Tired of this damn merry-go-round of misery.

It wasn't even as though he was doing this on purpose. That was the most infuriating thing about it, really. Of all the things to get in trouble for, it had to be the one thing he had absolutely no control over.

Well, _one_ of the things, anyway.

Meanwhile, Leonardo was still trying to reign in his righteous fury and attempting to keep a nice, level head. "Just exactly why are you still doing that?" he asked with every pretense of calm. The underlying sharpness to his words gave his mood away, though.

"Oh, yes," Michelangelo replied, drawing out the words sarcastically, "That's it exactly. I was bored, okay? I thought: Hey! What can I do today? Play Sonic? Make a sugar cube replica of the Chrysler building? Watch movies? Oh, I know! I can just binge and purge like a supermodel!"

The towel in his hand was bunched up and he wasn't even bothering with going through the motions of scrubbing the floor anymore. He let out a breath and got to his feet, pushing past Leonardo to get to the bathroom. He could hear his brother's footsteps behind him, and ignored that in favor of getting to the sink to get his hands clean.

"I know," he said loudly, turning the faucet head with a sharp jerk, "Maybe it's just your cooking. Maybe that's it! Let me see, what was that, that thing you made for me yesterday? I think it was some kind of freaky hot dog casserole. Yeah, that was some real great stuff, Leo. Maybe you can get a career as a gourmet chef in an animal shelter."

Water spilled over his hands in an angry rush as he tried to take as long as possible, pretending that this whole hand-washing thing was the most fascinating viewing experience since the third Spiderman film.

Leonardo stayed just beyond the door, because he was an idiot who seemed to think that giving someone space meant staying within a certain distance of them but still watching them like a crazed stalker. It made him angry because it felt like he was on watch, or like Leonardo thought he was going to need to do an intervention.

Like Leonardo thought that if he left him for one minute, he'd explode or turn homicidal or suicidal or hang himself from the rafters, something completely insane. Like he couldn't get any breathing space, not even when he wanted to be alone and maybe think for a good half an hour at least about…anything, everything, his life changing and Leonardo not leaving, but everything still not shifting back to safety, back to a nice, normal life when all he had to worry about was extra back flips. If only.

So now, he was left with the irrational bipolar urges to simultaneously make Leonardo stop inching around him and leaving a constant three-foot gap between them, and to snap at him to make him go the hell away.

"I just thought we'd agreed that this was going to stop," Leonardo said from his nice safe distance, and Michelangelo felt like strangling him.

"Yeah," he said, staring pointedly at the water swirling down the drain, "Well, I guess my stomach didn't agree." He looked up, the motion sharp enough to make his neck muscles ache, "You think I'm doing this on purpose? You think I'm trying to bulimia myself into an early grave because of you? _Please_."

Michelangelo stepped away from the sink and took a step forward, close enough to reach out if he wanted to and grab his brother, smack him, or just try to give him a shove like he'd used to. He didn't touch him. "If that's what I wanted, Leo," he said, his voice taking a bitter edge, "I'd give myself a much cleaner death."

Leonardo stared at him, a picture of shock, and after a few horrified seconds of 'why did I just say that?', he was about to dive into a backpedal. Even though there probably wasn't much he could say to take away the sting, the realism of those words.

Then Donatello, looking pale and shaken and like he'd heard every word of their conversation, stepped out from around the corner.

Michelangelo gave him a very good deer-caught-in headlights look and cursed the rotten, rotten timing of his life's scriptwriter. "Hi, Don," he said, making an effort to sound normal, "Don't worry, I'm just on my way out."

"Wait," Donatello said in a rush, "I, well, I couldn't help but hear the argument, and I've been wanting to talk to Leo about it- well, if you've just been eating a lot of regular food, and your stomach isn't used to it, it would make sense that it's been basically rejecting it. You can't start off eating as much as you used to, or the same types of food that you used to."

In the brief silence that followed, Leonardo and Michelangelo looked at each other with similarly rueful and frustrated expressions. _Why didn't we think of that? Why didn't _you _think of that?_

Donatello, encouraged by this, continued. "See, when you…when you starve yourself, your stomach sort of shrinks, and it's not realistic for you to put the same amount of food back in there. It would be better if," and he looked at Leonardo as he said this last part, "I think that instead of trying to give him big meals all at one time, you should just fed him small amounts at regular times throughout the day. At least at first, so he can start getting used to it and regaining weight."

As Donatello and Leonardo discussed this new change to his dietary plans, Michelangelo turned off the faucet, watched the water slide down the drain and leave nothing behind it but droplets to show it had even been there.

"Mikey?"

He turned and saw them staring at him. "Oh. What?"

"Does that sound okay?"

Michelangelo wanted to say that anything sounded okay now in that he was unlikely to put up a struggle, but everything also sounded potentially dangerous enough to send him toppling from the tightrope it felt like he was walking on these days. "Sure," he said, "Sure. Why shouldn't it? Sounds fine."

* * *

"Did you really mean that?" 

The floor cleaner smelled chemical and sharp, sickly-sweet. He looked up at Leonardo and took in his expression. It looked like he was trying to take in some thought much too big to be processed all at once, like he was turning memories over in his mind and coming to conclusions.

"Mean what?" he asked, turning away, "About your cooking? Not really, but that hot dog casserole really was awful."

"I meant," Leonardo said, quiet and careful, "Did you mean it when you said that about dying?"

Michelangelo rocked back on his heels, not quite falling backwards from the impact of those words, and opened his mouth to automatically protest that no, he did not, and he wasn't in any danger of going off on a crazy kamikaze run to his doom. Right on the heels of that thought came more, thoughts of how he'd been living lately, constantly confused, apathetic, like his life had turned into a big cloud of fog he had to stumble blindly around in. He remembered standing in his room, trying to remember where he'd placed something and not remembering where he'd put it or even what it was he was looking for.

"…Yes," he said eventually, "But no. I think, I mean, if I was going to _try_…then, yes. But I didn't actually try to, Leo. It's more like, that's how it is. That's how it was. And everything got worse and worse, and I don't know if, well, how it would have ended. But I never _tried_ to."

When looked up, Leonardo looked like he'd expected him to. He looked like what he'd heard wasn't what he wanted to hear, but it wasn't the worst he could have heard, either.

"Well, I'm sorry," Leonardo said, still in that 'walking on eggshells' tone, "I mean, for taking so long. And for leaving you the first time." He reached out, slowly and with caution, like he wanted to touch him on the shoulder reassuringly. His brother's hand hovered just an inch away from actually coming in contact with his skin.

He wanted to snap at him that he wasn't going to infect him with a plague or something or to tell him not to strain himself trying to act too caring and understanding. The sarcasm rose in his throat like acid, like bile. Like poison. He swallowed the comments and smiled, shaky and half-sincere, because he wasn't going to keep on striking out at people. _Wasn't going to keep striking out at Leo for what he couldn't do and what he couldn't feel. _"Okay," he said, and that was it, and it was so simple he almost choked on it.

* * *

They stuck to Donatello's diet plan and it actually did work, after a while. The steady diet of small, bland meals, toast and watered juice and fruit started to stay down. He and Leonardo settled into something like a groove: steady and patient, neither of them pushing too hard. It felt okay. It might have even felt _good_. This was a little surprising, considering the circumstances, and he found himself constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. So far, it wasn't. 

Once he managed to get that new diet thing down, some of the fog started leaving his mind. Reality cut through it like beams of sunlight: not with a razor edge like a knife, but with the clear edges and definition of a bright day. It was like he'd been walking around with a bad case of astigmatism and all of the sudden, someone had given him a pair of glasses.

"It's like, okay, my life is like one of those old black and white movies, okay?" he said to Donatello, perching on a high stool near his worktable and letting his legs swing like he was five, "And all of the sudden, someone just turned on the Technicolor switch."

"That makes sense," Donatello said, handing him his shellcell: he'd been putting in a few new additions to it and wanted to test them out, "I mean, with your body in the shape it was before, it was only natural that the lack of energy and sleep deprivation would affect your perception and awareness."

Michelangelo nodded, "Yeah, I guess that's part of it. Sounds like I was on drugs or something with that perception-impaired talk, but I'm definitely feeling more energy. I mean, it's like a serious battery recharge. It used to be that I was totally wiped just doing something like picking up dishes or exercises. And then, even when I was feeling ready to crash, I couldn't. Like, I'd lie down and close my eyes, but I couldn't sleep."

Part of that was habit, he'd woken in a cold sweat from too many nightmares, but he didn't feel like describing _those_ to Don.

"Well, how have you been sleeping lately? It's really important to know that, because if you haven't been getting enough sleep, it'll throw a whole bunch of problems into the mix. I don't want to give you sleeping pills or anything-"

"No," Michelangelo said, cutting him off, "No medicine. Sleeping…" he trailed off, "Well, I won't say it's the greatest sleep pattern in the world. But I am getting some every night, which is more than I could say before. I used to skip whole nights of sleep. I just couldn't do it."

It was more than that. Sleeping had seemed like everything else: just a waste of time. After a while, everything had seemed like a waste of time. Funny, since it wasn't like he even used his time for anything useful. And when he finally could close his eyes and pass into a restless, sleeplike semi-consciousness, it seemed to last all day. It was different now: less of him lying half-conscious with a headache in a pile of sheets and more of him passing out at nine-thirty and waking up at one to two AM. Still, sleep every night was sleep every night, even if it wasn't exactly eight hours.

Donatello nodded, looking unsure but willing to take him at his word for now. "Well, if you're sure." And then the conversation dipped into a long discussion about when he'd actually be able to eat junk food again.

It was easy talking about being sick to Donatello. He'd talk about completely objective things, likes symptoms and physical problems and the way to fix those, cures and medicines and other such trivia that had nothing to do with how he was feeling or why he'd even sunk that low in the first place. And when he did ask why, because it was stupid to think that he'd never ask, he didn't push when Michelangelo told him that it wasn't something he could talk about. There was no sense of guilt involved in talking to him, he didn't feel horrible for not talking or like he was betraying him by keeping the truth away.

Master Splinter had eventually accepted the fact that he and Leonardo were keeping the root of the situation to themselves, had in fact accepted it some time before they had even started to try and work their problems out. He obviously wasn't fond of the decision, but he'd told Michelangelo that he couldn't help a problem he couldn't understand, and if they were completely against telling him anything, there was nothing else he could do.

The miserable resignation in his father's voice had made him want to say something, anything to reassure him, but he knew anything he had to say about the whole mess would just complicate things even more. Really, how would him knowing everything make anything that much better? If anything, it could only make it worse. And it brought back thoughts of his old worries, of being sent away, of Splinter never looking at him the same again.

"There's no helping it," Leonardo had said, looking just as uncomfortable about it as he did, "But you were right, and I think it's for the best, it wouldn't do him any good to know."

"You're keeping stuff from Master Splinter now. It's happened," Michelangelo had said, perfectly deadpan. "I'm dragging you down to a life of crime."

And it wasn't really all that funny, especially with the question that slipped into his tone, (_am I dragging you down?_) but they laughed anyway. Because what else were they going to do?

It wasn't crazy laughing at least, not the kind that hurt coming out or the kind that kept on for too long. Tired, maybe, but not crazy, and that was a definite achievement.

"It's all part of my master plan," he continued, "Send you into a life of crime, corrupt your morals, and eventually…I don't know. We could rig a horse race."

Leonardo smiled at that, one of his quiet, not-quite grins, and for a second Michelangelo caught himself staring and had to glance away until the feeling passed and he stopped seeing the glint of white, the curve of his brother's smile and the lines under his eyes when he smiled. When he'd looked back his brother was looking at him warily and the moment was completely broken.

"I'm going to go…check on Raph," Leonardo said, cautious as he moved away, not quite meeting his eyes. Michelangelo wanted to be angry with him for that: what, like he was going to jump him on eye contact? He nodded instead and let him go.

He remembered being six and having the flu after his brothers had finished with it, being the only one sick and miserable in the old beanbag that was his first bed. He'd lain there, watching the others play and counting the days, hours, minutes, and thinking that he'd never get better again.

Michelangelo remembered Splinter sitting by him and telling him not to worry, that it felt like time passed much slower when someone was ill, but it did pass. _This too, will pass._

Watching Leonardo walking away from him again, he wondered if it ever would.

* * *

"So, you look better," April said from across the table, stirring a creamer into her coffee and trying to act normal and casual. Her shoulders were hunched and tense, and she played idly with her spoon, stirring more than was necessary. "From…when I saw you last time, I mean. I haven't seen you in a while." 

April had cut her hair so it was boy-short, layered around her face so it fell in her eyes and touched the sides of her cheeks. It looked good on her, giving her a sort of waifish pixie-like look. He figured he shouldn't mention that, since April had explicitly stated that she completely hated the pixie/waif look, and also because the situation was weird enough as it was.

When it had become clear that Donatello was not going to find a specific computer piece in his usual scavenging locations, he'd decided to go to April's place to sort through her spare electronics to see if she had one he could use. So, now he was knee-deep in gadgets and probably as distracted as a kid in Toys'R Us, and Casey had given both he and April reassuring man-pats before leaving them alone with a few blatantly obvious comments that hinted towards him wanting them to talk.

So, they were talking about normal things like how Splinter was doing and what Donatello was thinking of making with the computer part that he couldn't put a name to, and the crazy adventures of Raphael and Casey. So far it had been ten minutes, and they'd managed to sit there making awkward and forced conversation without him slipping into a bad topic or provoking April into a tearfest. She looked like she might: her eyes had that suspicious gleam to them and once in a while, her lip would do this warning twitch in the middle of a sentence. Still, other than that and Casey's mud coffee, it was all peachy.

Just him, April, and the giant elephant lurking in the corner of the room.

"I guess I feel better," he said. Safe enough thing to say. "I mean, I'm gonna be okay."

"I…I didn't think I'd get to talk to you again," April blurted, and the room got very quiet. It hadn't exactly been noise city to begin with, just just she and him sitting at the coffee table like they were having high tea or something, but that was about the only way he could think of describing it: a quiet room with another hush falling over it, like a layer of snow falling over ice.

It took him a few seconds to actually understand what she was saying. He hadn't thought about the big Casey romance mix-up in what felt like forever: all of it was sort of jumbled up past the hazy wall that separated the months before his depression.

"Oh," he said dumbly, before his mind tossed him a hint in the form of the memory in question. "Oh! Hey, it wasn't that. I mean, it might have looked like it, but-"

"No, let me explain. Please," she added, "I mean, I've been thinking about saying this for a long time, and I know I've seen you around before and I could have talked to you, but, I mean, at first I didn't think I needed to." She sighed at that and looked away, looking like she was trying to pull her thoughts together. "After you called me, I thought that you were just upset, you weren't thinking straight, you'd talk to me later. It sounds really arrogant now, but that's what I thought. I keep…I kept thinking of you as someone your age, just a teenager, like I knew what was better for you. It was a stupid thing to think."

She sighed, her lips curved just barely at the edges in a smile. "And of all people, Casey had to tell me about what I was doing wrong. And you know how I can't take advice from him, it took me a week to finally get it. But then after that, I don't know what happened with you. Your brothers won't really say much about it, but I could look at you and see something was wrong. I thought maybe you were sick, but I'm not over at you guys' place enough to tell. By that time, I don't think you were talking to anybody. So that's why. I kept thinking that one day, maybe you'd disappear and I wouldn't be able to say anything to you."

April trailed off shakily and he put his hand on her shoulder. "Look, you don't have to keep on going," he said, hoping she wouldn't because he definitely saw traces of teardrops on the fringe of her lower eyelashes, and he did _not_ want to weather the waterworks. _Great, they leave me alone for three seconds and I make someone cry. _

"No, I do. And it's a little too late, I know that, but I need to say it anyway. I'm sorry. You were trying to talk to me about something private and I didn't have the right to tell anyone about it, especially not Casey."

"Forget about it," Michelangelo said, "I mean, I have. Seriously, I had to think a few minutes. I thought I'd been in a coma or something."

She giggled at that and he hugged her. It surprised him that it felt comforting, not complicated or dangerous, no strange feelings or wary looks, just warm arms and her hair brushing his neck. For a second he thought _he _might cry, which was stupid because what did he have to be upset about? He didn't cry, and he didn't hold on too long like he wanted to, either.

"You're thinner than you used to be," April said, a dark flicker of concern in her eyes as she pulled back.

"Atkins diet," he said quickly, "Working wonders already."

And then Donatello came downstairs with his weird wire-metal thing and he was spared having to explain any more. When they got home, he looked at his reflection in the mirror, _really _looked this time, and noticed his skin was looser in places, his arms and legs thinner than they had been before, less muscle. Leonardo came in and raised an eye ridge at him, made some dry comment about posing like a swimsuit model. When he turned and looked at him, Leonardo's expression turned serious very quickly.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Michelangelo said, "Just…I can't believe how close I could have got." He couldn't believe that he hadn't noticed, that the loss of weight hadn't made an impact at all. He couldn't believe that he very well could have kept on shrinking away until skeleton-thin, he would have keeled over. Something like that was way too much to take in without buckling a little under the pressure. The gravity of the situation was pulling him down. "Damn," he muttered. "Just, I…damn."

"Come on," Leonardo said finally, "We've still got some work to do."


	9. the hardest part of getting free

**Growing Pains and Orange Bitters**

**Chapter Nine**: _the hardest part of getting free_

By: Serendipity

**Author's Note**: Wow, and here we are at the last chapter. (Disregarding the epilogue.) It seems like I've been writing this story forever. It's ancient! It's amazing, because no other story has made me as persistent to complete it as this one has. I'm probably going to go back to long one-shots for a while after this baby. Or AM I?

* * *

At first it was really difficult to start training.

That was expected, but it didn't stop the little rush of shock when he picked up a weight and felt his muscles strain to lift it. He hadn't remembered it being this hard to lift something he could have easily handled before, not even when he remembered how, during the thick, heavy days of depression, training had left him exhausted and winded enough to want to lie down and black out for hours. All of that was sort of a foggy, grey blur in his mind, so it was almost to be expected that he couldn't pick anything really solid from that.

For him, the hardest part of doing anything was starting it. Building, working, progressing, all of it was kind of, (not really, but almost, almost in the way that he had no way to describe it otherwise), simple. It was harder to tip the boulder over the cliff than to let it roll down.

He did stretches, small exercises and weight-training to build up the muscle, worked back up from simple kata to jumpstart the muscle memory.

Michelangelo set himself to an even brisker training regimen than Leonardo had actually prescribed for him: he wanted to work out, to climb the steep hill to recovery. He wanted to get better as quickly as possible, and this was just one hurdle to leap over on the way there. He'd never been the most patient of them, and sometimes all of that reckless flinging himself into training his body wasn't ready for actually had a price.

Since the price was usually exhaustion and a sleep so deep he wouldn't dream, he was more than ready to pay up. Of course, there were sore muscles and Leo lectures to contend with, so it wasn't all peaches. The patented Leo lectures were pretty much the same every time, slowing down, making sure he didn't overextend himself, remembering he was still recovering.

That was a pretty funny thing to remind him of, all things considered. He knew he wasn't 'recovered' yet. Michelangelo knew this because, well, he didn't feel exactly 'whole' anymore, despite the fact that he didn't feel so much like a ghost. Now he was better, no doubt about it, but still not quite right. He felt like someone had broken him and put him back together with a few pieces missing, leaving tiny and yet noticeable holes.

"You're drifting off again."

He turned and Leonardo was watching him speculatively. Those looks were getting easier and easier to read every day.

This was probably because Leonardo insisted on being his personal trainer every single damn day, which didn't really help matters much. Some people might have said that he was being a dutiful and thoughtful older brother. Michelangelo had decided that he was being an obsessed _pain in the neck _and a mother hen who couldn't actually take a hint and had taken to demanding cold showers even if he didn't really need them, just to make him back off for a few minutes.

"We've been doing this for the last two hours," he said, stretching to try and take some of the ache from his muscles. "Excuse me for not being a crazy person who can eat, drink, and breathe ninjitsu. I mean, I think we all get it by now. Ninjitsu is your profession. It's, like, your vocation. You probably feed off of spirit energy now. But normal people like me? Sometimes might get a little bored."

To punctuate this comment, he executed a few series of kicks and punches at the heavy bag, the blows making thick sounds against the leather.

"It's not because of that," Leonardo continued, "Boredom, I can see. Your focus is being compromised because you keep on pulling those all-night sessions, and you're not getting enough sleep. Remember what Don said about that? Your body's just not well rested enough to handle that, and if you keep on doing this, we're going to have you collapsing from exhaustion again. Sleep deprivation-"

"Yes, right, I _know_!" he snapped out, "Sleep more, eat more, join our professional training regimen to get buff! I'm just- I'm having trouble sleeping at night. Too much restless energy. I mean, it's for different reasons than before. I figure if I work out more, it'll get me more tired. I'm so weirdly hyped up all the time, it's insane."

He turned on his heel and headed over to the kitchen with the intention of grabbing some bottled water. His brother followed him at the usual distance, but just enough to make him acutely aware of his presence. While he understood why this might have occurred to Leonardo as being a necessary prevention step at first, it was really beginning to wear on his nerves.

Lately he felt like he was in some bizarre horror flick and Leonardo was the serial killer waiting in the wings. Only instead of a handgun or chainsaw, he'd have some kind of innocuous prop to suggest that he was just there to get milk or do the laundry.

There were two bottles of water left in the fridge, next to the carton of milk and the obscene collection of sports drink and Ballz. He snagged one, shut the refrigerator door, and turned around to see Leonardo still watching him.

"You know, if you really want to, Don can stick those surveillance cams up again," he suggested.

Leonardo looked puzzled. "Huh?"

"You know. He can stick up twenty-four hour 'Watch Mikey' cams in my room, and pretty much put them everywhere in the lair that I visit. And then you guys can rig the TV so it talks to me about cardiovascular stuff, and diet plans, and other healthy things, until I am a brainwashed zombie that shuffles around muttering "HEALTH FOOD" instead of "braaaaaains."

Water swished in the bottle as he gestured with both hands, indicating his zombified movements as they would surely come to be in the future. Leonardo had his eyes narrowed: he knew what he was getting at and was waiting for him to finish. Michelangelo changed the tone of his voice from flippant humor to something more serious, more quietly-spoken. The way he never would have spoken before any of this happened.

"No offense, but you're starting to creep me out. I mean, I understand," he added, seeing Leonardo begin to explain what he already knew, "It's not like I don't know why. I get it. I'm not, like, _mad_ about it. But you gotta understand me…it's strange. It's weird, seeing you around everywhere. With everything I'm trying to do, I mean, it's hard."

"Okay, I got it," Leonardo said, still with that slightly confused expression that told him that he didn't know exactly what to do with this situation here. That was beginning to be a common look on him. "I'll just go set up the equipment."

"And there's another thing. I was wondering if you could maybe _not_ be my practice partner?" The words shot past him without any attempt to think about them first, and he saw Leonardo stiffen and look back at him, brows drawn together, waiting for him to continue.

Michelangelo wasn't sure how he could describe the reasons for this without totally damaging Leo's sensibilities. The fact was, being near him all the time just made the attraction worse. Having him constantly hover over him was like some kind of torture, made even worse by the fact that Leonardo probably wasn't completely aware about just how much he was affecting him. It wasn't that they touched, or that they were even physically close lately…but the presence of his brother, just out of reach and still close enough to reach out and grab for built up day after day. He'd be a total liar if he said he hadn't entertained any hopes, or harbored any daydreams.

Meanwhile, those very fantasies made it even more difficult for him to see him each day. When he looked at him, imagined encounters still fresh on his mind, it made him feel like he was betraying Leonardo, like he was abusing him somehow, even if it was only in his thoughts. It made him paranoid, wondering how long it would take for those thoughts to fly out into the real world.

"It's really weird, bro," he managed, "I mean, with you always around me all the time, I get distracted. I don't want to, but I do," something of a lie, because he knew at least a part of him wanted to be distracted like that, "So you need to give me some space."

Leonardo exhaled slowly. "I understand."

"I mean-"

"I _understand_," Leonardo said with more force, cutting him off. An awkward silence fell, made of all the things between them that would have to go unvoiced.

It was bad enough having to talk about this at all without having the wall of stuttering, of unspoken buzzwords and hinted-at meanings. But neither of them actually came out and said it. And when either of them made a nudge in one direction, the other would shut it down. It was like a hygienic dysfunction. Something intimately humiliating that wasn't discussed in public.

There just wasn't really a good way to come out and say it. Even with the knowledge there, lingering between them thick and heavy as cigarette smoke in the air, talking about the problem was awkward enough to make his stomach twist into a pretzel and his throat close up to choke the words out. They spoke about it like it was an enemy waiting in the shadows, like just mentioning it by any name (incest, love, sick, feelings) would make it, like a demon, appear before them and spew secrets out into the air.

He was so, so tired of all of this.

"I can't have you near me all the time," he said finally, "It's…dude, it's confusing. I don't want to be confused. I don't want to feel like that, but you're always around, and it's-" _suffocating me _"Driving me insane."

Leonardo's expression looked oddly closed, the mask of complete control he wore when meditating or practicing. It was strange to see it on him while they were having, if not a casual conversation, then at least one without screaming or arguments. He nodded once, almost stiffly, and cleared his throat.

"Well," he said oddly, "I could stay away more. I'm just worried, sometimes. About you." Strange thing to say when he looked like he wanted to bolt from the room.

"I promise not to starve myself unless you're in the room watching me," he said, attempting to treat the issue with the lighthearted flippancy he could usually summon with ease, and failing. Both of them stood awkwardly in the silence until he sighed and added, "I promise I won't. I'm done with that. It's done."

Funny how he had to repeat it, as if by doing so he could make it a promise written in stone.

* * *

Sparring with Raphael turned out to be something else that was different from what it used to be. Back before, they used to play around, showing off new moves that didn't necessarily have real combat efficiency, pulling sneaky tricks, exchanging goofy insults and basically throwing in as much immaturity as they could get away with in front of Master Splinter. There was less of that now, with Michelangelo less inclined to be as playful, and Raphael less inclined to be as aggressive. He wasn't nearly strong enough to fight him as an equal, and Raphael wasn't about to raise the bar any farther than he had to.

Fighting him now was less hard-edged playfulness and more, surprisingly, a patient build-up of his combat skills. He was more patient than he'd actually given Raph credit for, and in his way more thoughtful than Leo had been.

Leonardo seemed to be pushing him, driving him to some point of health and mental wellness that only he could see and determine the distance of. It made sense why he would do it, he was worried and rushing to get his brother to a point of safety and stability, but the persistent, relentless way he went about it, never giving him slack, was tiring.

Raphael was less insistent. He didn't force a routine on him, even though there was sort of the framework of one. He clearly viewed all of that to be Leonardo's area of expertise, and so their sparring sessions were loose, anything-goes free-for-alls. Sometimes they'd use weapons, other times, when Michelangelo was tired from a heavy-duty exercise routine, they'd just play-fight, with Raphael calling out some of the moves he wanted Michelangelo to try on him, kicks, holds, maneuvers, and he'd end up sweating, tired, and yet satisfied. Sparring like that gave him pleasure in that it was something he didn't need to think about, and Raphael didn't ask him to talk about anything.

Truth be told, they barely spoke during those sessions.

Michelangelo pushed himself off the mat and braced for soreness, even though the ache of his muscles had been alleviated considerably as the months passed by. He kept on waiting for the soreness to act up as he sat up, moving gingerly out of force of habit. A few more bruises, nothing too bad.

"Augh," he moaned anyway, "This blows."

"Quitcher whining'," Raphael said, exhibiting a woeful lack of sympathy, "You get a five-minute break, and then we go back to more exercises. And _then_…well, then ya can go off and do whatever. Doin' pretty good today, actually."

Michelangelo snorted. "Sure I am. But you mean I can do _better_." That said, he snatched a towel off the rack and started mopping at his face, the sweat hot and prickly on his skin, his muscles burning. Not the intense burn that meant he'd be screaming for liniment the next day, but a comfortable kind that faded soon and left that clean, refreshing feeling after a good workout. That feeling he hadn't known he'd missed until he had it back again.

"I'm not complaining about all the training or anything. Okay, yeah…technically I am, but it's just complaining because I like to complain," he continued, ignoring Raphael's snort at that, "It's all good. But you know what would be great? Like, really, super, free comic book day, fluffernutter sundae with sprinkles great? Actually winning one of these. I'm missing the old days where I'd come in all macho and totally kick your ass."

That got him a laugh, Raphael gave him a friendly punch in the shoulder and snatched the towel, tossing it to the side. "Mikey, ya can't miss what was never there."

"What are you talking about? I specifically remember ass-kicking. Multiple occasions of ass-kicking."

"Yeah, well, you only remember those times because that was you getting' your butt pounded. Your memory that gone?"

"My memory is intact and full of shining moments of me totally winning. Lots of times."

"In what, Solitaire?"

"Oh, sure. Deny me my moments of glory. I have two words for you, dude. Battle. Nexus."

Raphael let out a groan of exaggerated exasperation and turned away. "Okay, champ, time's up. Back on the mat."

Michelangelo took a swig from his water bottle, remembering, in a stream of jumbled images, fighting when it was as easy as breathing, as easy as slipping through water. Remembered switching weapons with toys when his brothers weren't looking, playing tricks with silly putty and glue as they fought each other. Remembered more serious times after battles, when Leonardo (_instinctive curl of the stomach as his mind brushed upon his name_) pushed them time after time until they were sweating on the floor, fingers limp as noodles and wishing for rest. He remembered grey, miserable moments that played through his mind sluggishly, like ships moving through tar.

"Don't you want to…you know, ask me anything?" he said, quietly.

Raphael was turned away from him, so he couldn't see his expression as his shoulders lowered and firmly set. He shifted just enough so that Michelangelo could see his face, serious, eyes intense and betraying months worth of worries. Obviously trying to keep controlled.

"Would you answer me if I asked you?" He sounded hurt underneath all of that painstaking self-control, the kind that was alien to the way he usually let everything out in such brutal honesty.

Michelangelo swallowed hard and tasted blood, metallic on the roof of his mouth from a punch well-thrown. No good response came to him, or even (heaven forbid nowadays), a completely honest one. For a moment he floundered, caught between the instinctive and defensive reply of : 'yes, of course I would', and the more truthful: 'never, I couldn't risk-' then the moment passed and his brother patted him on the shoulder. He did it wordlessly, too rough, in the physical Raph-speak that meant for him not to worry about it.

He worried anyway.

The worry flared up in that instant and clung to him for some time afterward, thick and sticky, like the smell of smoke and burnt tar. Michelangelo wondered what would happen to him now, now that his own natural need to _talk _about problems was driving him and the only option open to him was the one person who he shouldn't talk to. Shouldn't, not because Leonardo wasn't willing, eager to help, but because Michelangelo was _too_ eager to let him. He acknowledged this with a sullen twist in his gut, that he wanted to rely on Leonardo, he wanted to carry on this dependence…and how dependent could he really allow himself to become?

It was just that, as time passed, he started to realize that even a little bit of dependence could end up being a little too much.

When long conversations started sparking that little flame of _hope _that should have been reduced to a guttering ember by now, when sparring with him, sweating and written brightly in his mind with remembered body heat, the burn of muscles, Leo's eyes…when that came back to him in dreams at night along with every useless, hopeless emotion that should have died stillborn by now- he worried. And realized that with too much dependence on his protective older brother, he might actually start nurturing that hope.

Michelangelo realized that nurturing it could end up with him letting it grow until it was out of his control. He might not even _want_ to get it back under control. And the fact, the realization that he could so clearly see himself doing that- it was more than a little frightening.

So he couldn't help but worry, a little more every day.

* * *

As time passed, his brothers stopped pulling their punches more and more. Little by little, practice returned to some degree of normalcy. Wooden practice weapons were replaced with live steel, and as his coordination steadily improved, he was able to return to using his nunchaku.

He'd missed using those weapons, had always been proud of his ability to handle the unstable, unpredictable nunchaku with accuracy and precision and even, if he was allowed to brag, with some artistic flair. A lot of artistic flair. He was the goddamn Picasso of nunchuckery. It was like being reunited with an old friend to have his 'babies' back, and to be able to wield them without his hands shaking to ruin his aim.

The first time he successfully knocked Leonardo's sword from his hand with a perfect lock, twisting the chain of his nunchuck around the blade and yanking the sword away with a practiced flick of his wrist, he received a smile that was part hope, part relief, and a lot of pride. He pulled off a few more disarming moves before his brothers realized that he was in truly possession of that skill and it wasn't just a lucky shot.

His body bulked back up, and Raphael decided that he no longer needed the muscle-building program he'd put him on when he felt he'd returned to the weight and muscle mass he'd been before.

The meals he was given passed from light foods and small, but frequent meals for a stomach that needed careful handling, and became more normally-portioned. His diet was rich with protein, full of meat and soy, and calcium with seaweeds and glasses of milk to repair the damage he'd done to his bone strength and his shell.

Despite his intense dislike for extra konbu and wakame in everything, no junk food, meat in everything, miso soup until he thought he was going to bleed it through his cuts, he couldn't deny the positive effect the diet had on him. Sluggishness faded away with time, and he became more alert, more energetic. Even his shell lost the dull, flaking quality it had before. (Michelangelo'd had nightmares of his shell deteriorating into sponginess, rotten material that crumbled away at the touch. The dreams always had him sitting up desperately, reaching back to see if it was intact.)

Raphael mixed bizarre energy drink smoothies for him, and Donatello made him vitamin cocktails that he decided to crush and add to his food to keep the nasty, dry-bitter pill taste away and keep him from gagging after the third vitamin tablet. The things tended to be unusually-shaped, large, strangely colored and speckled with flecks of a suspicious nature.

"Seriously, how many of these horse pills do I need?" he griped once, scooting the things around on the table and feeling suspiciously like a junkie.

Donatello gave him the stern professor look. It was a look that denoted that he knew best and Michelangelo should take his medicine or suffer the lecture that was sure to follow after more questioning.

Michelangelo met the stern professor look with an innocently questioning look of his own.

The looks battled for dominance before he decided to speak up again, rolling one of the things between thumb and forefinger without any real knowledge of what essential nutrients it supposedly contained. "I mean, I eat now, right? So, like, I should be getting everything from what I'm eating, right? No need for all of these medication and vitamin chasers?"

"Well, ideally, yes," Donatello said, "But we don't really have the means to keep you on a diet like that, and it's easier to give money to April for the vitamin supplements. Besides," he added with a touch of exasperation, "We aren't feeding you a whole bottle of pills every day. You have one multi-vitamin supplement, one calcium pill, one Vitamin C. Stop complaining, or we'll feed you nothing but the brown rice soup with seaweed."

"That is cruel and unusual. No, really, it is. That stuff looks like the creature from the black lagoon is going to pry itself out of the depths of my soup bowl and devour me whole."

It did, too. Brown rice was not only slimy and gross and dirty-tasting, but added in a strange, soup-like concoction with lengths of seaweed, it made a combination so vile and disgusting that he'd decided it was an abomination in the face of Iron Chef cooking gods and should be taken down. Whoever had decided it was a good combination was an insane cooking dark lord. He strongly suspected Donatello looked up strange health food recipes on the internet and fed him these mixtures to punish him for being sick. Which, of course, made him feel more than a little obligated to swallow the stuff in a culinary form of an apology.

'It's awful," he repeated.

Donatello picked out the dose from the table, poured the tablets into an empty cereal bowl with a tip of his hand, and started crushing them into fine powder. "Better get used to it, then," he said with a smile and a note of cheer. Michelangelo took the powdered stuff in his oatmeal with brown sugar and a token sigh of woeful regret that was more for Donatello, really, than for himself.

* * *

The punch caught him on the collarbone, forcing him to stumble back and duck to avoid the following blow, spinning around on hands and feet to defend himself. He turned and swung out wildly, trying to land a punch on Leonardo.

"Faster! Get that speed up!"

Leonardo easily sidestepped him, and his attempt to strike his shoulder failed. His knuckles barely scraped the edge of Leonardo's shell as his brother moved past him, almost careless in the way he shrugged off Michelangelo's attacks.

They'd been at this for hours, and he still didn't look like he was breaking a sweat. Bastard. He also seemed to be following his request for distance: he didn't make small talk, he didn't joke, he didn't even adjust his posture by physically demonstrating, moving his arms and legs in stance to make sure he understood. Instead, they had taken to absolute serious, straight-faced professionalism and safe distance. Leonardo would recite critique and the occasional praise, Michelangelo would follow through, and neither of them would step out of their neat little protective boxes.

"Watch your back!"

The flat of Leonardo's blade swatted against the bare flesh of his bicep, leaving a stinging mark that would bruise later. Backing up again, he circled him, striking out with his nunchaku every time he felt he could get away with it, and Leonardo blocked each of his attacks with a flashing gesture of his sword. While he could beat Donatello and occasionally Raphael now, if just through pure sneakiness, Leonardo continued to be too much of a challenge, and not just because of his skill. Fighting him, facing him, seeing him…all of it still felt weird. Still felt like going through a familiar action, but with something crucial about it twisted. Like walking through an upside-down hallway.

When one last attack failed to succeed, Michelangelo, growing more fatigued, his skin crawling with perspiration and heat, fell back and waited for an opening. None presented itself: with Leonardo going back to their no-holds-barred sparring method, chances of finding a weak point were few and far between. He flowed past him like water, just as changeable and just as impossible to pin down.

On one hand, this was something like a good sign in that it meant Leonardo felt that he was in shape enough and he had returned to a high enough skill level that they could fight seriously with him. This meant that he would most likely be let out to go aboveground soon, something he was looking forward to most of all. He'd missed watching the sky, feeling night breeze on his skin, watching the lights of passing cars and hearing the buzz and hum of the people in the street.

Hell, he'd even missed the high crime rate. He'd definitely missed beating down on the thugs who made the high crime rate. So, all of this serious, in-your-face fighting and training and catching up to practice his brothers had learned while he'd been…sick, yes, it had its good points.

On the other hand, it also meant longer and longer sessions, less free time (which he really needed lately, needed to sit and feel calm and do something _normal_, like video games), and a return to the back-breaking exercise which, in hindsight, he hadn't really missed all that much.

Leonardo made a move to attack him and he flipped backwards, landing neatly on his feet. Without pausing, he spun his weapons, building up momentum as he circled behind his opponent.

"Go ahead, attack," said Leonardo, watching him.

That was usually a lead in for Leonardo to pull off something sneaky and unexpected as ninjas generally did, but Michelangelo decided to take the bait, anyway. If anything, this particular sparring session had been going on at least an hour too long.

"Fine," he said shortly, diving in, performing a sideways swipe with his spinning nunchuck and aiming for a blow to the shell. None of them went for the various lethal targets in sparring practice when they used their actual weapons, since the risk involved was too great.

Still, neither of them had gone close to anywhere damaging when they fought: their blows had normal strength behind them, but their aim always erred towards the side of mercy. Blows to the back, to the shell, to the armored chest and never to a weak point. Maybe it didn't feel right striking out at each other's weakest points anymore.

As expected, Leonardo saw the swing coming and dodged it, launching himself in the air in a backwards flip that sent him soaring over his head, and Michelangelo saw his chance and took it. Lashing out with a speedy strike, he whipped a nunchuck up and snapped it hard against Leonardo's inner heel as he was airborne. The sudden pain in his ankle made him stumble, briefly, when he landed, and Michelangelo used the opportunity to land a swift roundhouse kick.

The glow of victory lasted about a second before Leonardo grabbed his outstretched leg and flipped him to the floor, pinning him with a foot to his chest.

Michelangelo looked up at the sword leveled at him and grinned wryly. "Maybe next time?"

"Maybe not.," Leonardo said, sheathing the swords in the swift, easy way he had. Having nothing left to say that didn't cross the boundary lines Michelangelo had laid down, Leonardo bent down slightly, extending a hand to help him up.

He looked at it dumbly at first, and then with consideration, as if waiting for something else to happen, and took it slowly. The warm grip of the hand hauling him upright was sensation enough to remind him that, lack of self-starvation or not, he still wasn't as stable as he could be. "Uh, thanks," he said haltingly, words spilling out one after another, a brief pause between each one. "So, um, I'm, like, getting better?"

"Of course you are," Leonardo said firmly, and it was obvious that he was pulling another one of his 'talk about two things at once' moments.

"Good," Michelangelo said in return. There wasn't much else he could say to that.

Clearing his throat, Leonardo continued. "That was a nice move when you hit me while I was overhead. Nice ingenuity. Creative." He sounded desperate to turn the conversation towards something safe, something that couldn't slip past his control and flip everything into instability. That was how they'd ended up speaking to each other lately, polite and on edge and always aware of the chance of avalanches occurring at any minute. So, he thought he was really doing both of them a humongous favor by going to check on the progress Donatello was making on the mysterious new tangle of wires and miscellaneous metal pieces he was working on at his worktable.

And so, when Leonardo grabbed his shoulder to keep him from leaving, it came as a surprise.

"What?" he asked, feeling a bubble of nervousness in his stomach, "I forget something?" _Please let it be that I forgot something,_ and yet a trace of something else laced that thought, making it false.

"Look, this isn't working," Leonardo said, without any prelude whatsoever, because he was devastatingly blunt that way. "I know this is…difficult. And yeah, it is really weird, but this is just not working. It's one thing to ask me to keep my distance, which I've been doing. But it's another to just avoid each other like we have some kind of disease, and that kind of alienation isn't good for either of us. It isn't good for the family, and it isn't good for the team."

"How is it not good for them?" Michelangelo snapped out, ignoring the rest of it stubbornly, "I'm- it's not like everyone's _you_. It's not like we ever talked that much before! This whole…let's hang out with Mikey thing is pretty new to the family scene. I mean, on your side, not on theirs," he added miserably.

What he didn't want to say because it was too soaked in bitterness was: 'You never paid this much attention to me until I half-killed myself from not having it, and then you didn't even give me what I wanted.' Too bitter, and he knew it was only half-truthful, because he still didn't even know what he wanted, and he was pretty sure wanting Leo was like wanting a bullet to the head as far as life choices went. What he thought of saying and didn't want to say: 'Since when did you start talking for the whole family? Why do you always have to play like you're my dad and not my brother? Why does it have to be about the team and not about you and me?'

_Or all about me_, he thought, and his stomach twisted.

"Well, all right, I know what you mean," he relented. "They're gonna worry. You're right. It sucks, but….dude, I'm not going to be feeling right just talking like, like nothing's happened. And-" he cut off the rest, about how it was all still there, still intact despite all of his attempts to kill it, and somehow cutting a little deeper every day. It was just that he didn't notice, he could go through periods of normalcy before being jolted back into it by stupid, stupid little things. Not even the same reason every time: sometimes it was something as innocent as a memory, a picture, and sometimes it was as physical as Leonardo's arm against his.

"You can't just keep running away from me," Leonardo said, and he wanted to scream at him that yes, he could, and that's what he should be wanting from him.

Instead he let out a breath, steadying himself. Held himself in an unconsciously sturdy position, legs out, arms at his sides. "I told you that I couldn't get rid of it. Don't make me…don't ask me to hang out around you like _this_."

And he wanted to tell him what it would be like, how much worse it could get, but he couldn't. Couldn't because Leonardo was grossed out enough as it was, because any more information on that subject could probably ruin things (worse than they were?) and disrupt the delicate balance that they had going where neither of them cringed at each other and they could both look at each other in the eye. This was all thanks to the lack of TMI that he was being careful of.

It was a very important part of his everyday life that he keep a tight hold on all of the disturbing things and make sure they didn't crawl out like a whole slew of Pandora's box-type nasties.

Leonardo, clearly, did not understand this simple fact. He looked exasperated and definitely seemed to be floundering as he tried to make Michelangelo see reason. "I just meant," he said firmly, "That ignoring each other isn't a great solution to anything. Not that I can think of a solution to it, at the moment," he added with even more frustration, "But this…this is wrong. For one thing, it's not good for us as a team. Master Splinter told us that we can't operate without harmony."

"Which is great advice and all," Michelangelo interrupted, "But what kind of weird spiritual harmony can you expect from me right now?"

"Well, at least TALK to me once in a while! I-I can't stand not knowing what's wrong with you, okay? I spent too much time _not_ knowing, and I spent too much time not knowing what to do after that, and I think that compared to what happened, compared to you…killing yourself without even thinking about it, I think that nothing you say can possibly be worse than that. I already know the-the problem," he said, lowering his voice as he realized they were in the middle of the Lair and being overheard wasn't so much an option as it was an inevitability, "And I've been trying to deal with that. But I can't deal with anything I don't know, and I can't help anything I can't see!"

He stood there, feeling heavy as rock. "You _can't_ fix me," he said finally, quietly.

Leonardo stepped up closer to him, almost getting close enough to break personal space. Just on the edge of that barrier, edging the line. "I don't _want_ to," he said intensely, "I mean, of course I do, but that isn't what I'm expecting to come out of this. Michelangelo, I understand why you don't want to be around me, and I know that I am the last person who can make your problems go away. For the record, I don't even expect them to magically fade away from anything I do. I'd like that, I'd like to think that just trying to set everything back to normal would actually make it so, but I know better."

"All I'm asking is that you stop closing me out- because then you start closing everyone out, and everything will degenerate until the cycle begins right where we left off. That's how it started near the worst of it, wasn't it? And you'll end up returning to that pattern again, only this time we might not be able to turn you away from the edge."

Leonardo paused for breath, looking like he'd caught on to a particularly good idea and he had to continue with it, keep on moving with that train of thought or else he'd lose it. That was a familiar expression to him, because it was one of the many 'Leo' expressions that was more often than not directed his way. He saw it every time Leonardo was attempting to explain some important concept to him and he couldn't understand what he was trying to say when it was all wrapped up in metaphor and spirituality and yin and yang stuff.

It was a look that said he'd found some way to express an idea so Michelangelo could understand it, could grab onto the meaning of the words and actually retain the information, and for a moment he remembered climbing a mountain, hands gripping the security of solid stone, cold air on his skin in a breeze that brushed through him instead of merely over him. Remembered the fear and worry over his fight in the arena feeling a little comfortingly distant from where they stood, and he recalled how the sky stood a perfect, motionless blue as Leonardo told him that they depended on each other as a group. Depended on _him_.

"When I was training with the Ancient One," Leonardo began slowly, "I remember trying to get past his guard in a particular exercise he had set me to. None of what he'd taught me up until then worked against him in the exercise, and no matter what sequence of attacks I tried, I failed every time. After the tenth attempt, he told me- well, what he told me might confuse you more than help you," he added, "But basically, he said that I was losing each time due to my own lack of creativity. I was trying to use all the by-the-book methods without trying to think of anything new."

"I got so caught up in thinking along the lines of training, I didn't bother thinking _outside_ of them. I learned that there is no precise formula for success, and that if you make an attempt, and it fails, that it might now have been the correct approach to begin with. I learned that 'try, try again' should be 'try again in a different way. I forget that, sometimes," he said, voice going quiet, like it did when he admitted he did something wrong, "It's more difficult for me, sometimes, to find a new way of doing things, when what I usually do gets results. But, look…if what you've been trying, if what you're doing isn't working for you, then try something else. Find another way."

Michelangelo felt his stance lose its strength, felt his shoulders slacken and he crossed his arms, his fingers pressing into his bicep. "I don't know any other ways."

Leonardo smiled at him, tiredly. "You'll think of one. You're good at thinking outside of the lines."

* * *

The advice did stick, and he puzzled it over like one of Master Splinter's riddles in his head, like he was looking at one of those chain link puzzles and turning it from all angles to see how it worked.

So, it was clear that he couldn't ignore everything and hope for the best. That he needed to talk to his brother more, say more things than just what was absolutely necessary for two people living together with other family in the same space. Because Leonardo was _right_, awkward sexual weirdness aside, they were family, they were a clan, and that was supposed to go above and beyond anything else. He wondered why he used to think everything else would just crumble away in the face of that important word, family, when he felt his longing pulling at him the most.

Sometimes that felt more tangible, raw and real and unbending in the face of something as abstract as 'family'. Michelangelo would worry which one would win out, family or Leonardo, or really, since Leonardo was family and the longing wasn't really him, he wondered if the winner would be 'family' or 'Michelangelo'. And that scared him, because he'd always thought of himself as part of the family, not outside of it. He'd felt like outside of family, there wasn't a whole 'Michelangelo'.

When the day's exercises were over, Master Splinter dismissed the rest of his brothers and kept Michelangelo behind, beckoning him to follow to his room for a talk in private. He'd gone so far beyond fear of discovery that he actually spent some time wondering why he was being singled out for a talk this time, as if it was something simple like lack of concentration or doodling in his sketchbook while he was supposed to be paying attention to his lessons.

Not that he'd taken back to sketching any more, since a glance of his sketchbook in his depression stage had been enough to make him toss it in the trash can without a glance backwards and a silent decision to never draw anything until he could keep his problems from leaking out of his brain and onto the paper.

So, he wandered behind Splinter, in the half-thoughtful, half-out-in-space way he was tending towards usually. Not thinking of anything much, not going over anything important, but wondering, idly, about trivial, stupid little things. Like how to get to the next stage of the video game he'd just begun to play, and how many different ways he could beat the game before he got bored. Video games were great time-killers, and they were also great for spending time with people without actually having to talk to them. Great inventions all around.

He knelt down before his father, taking the typical way of sitting: formally, hands resting on his knees, and waited for whatever he had to tell him. His breath caught in his throat as the silence drew on a little longer than it should, and Splinter looked hesitating, like he didn't know what to say.

"Michelangelo," he said finally, "I know these past months have been a difficult time for you. You have stumbled into your first true spiritual crisis, and have come through your ordeal intact, at least physically. I am proud of you for accomplishing this, and I am proud of your brothers for supporting you. I do not know why you did not wish to reach me about your problems, but I acknowledge the fact that you felt you were unable to, I understand that there are some things that must remain private and for yourself alone, even in my own children. It is hard for me to accept, and I do- worry," he admitted, the falter only slight, but enough to be audible.

Once Splinter began talking, Michelangelo's expression had shifted until it became a sort of frozen, perpetual cringe. "I'm- yes," he said haltingly, and because there wasn't anything else to say, added, "I'm sorry." He couldn't say: 'It wasn't important', or 'I had it under control', because that was just obviously and totally a wash, and problems that were trivial didn't usually cause depression and months of side effects. Not to mention the whole situation with causing family rifts and endangering missions and otherwise being a total screw-up.

Then there were the fifty-dozen problems with telling the truth.

He looked down, his hands clenched over his knees, and subsided into silence as he waited for the rest of what his father had to tell him. In a weird way, he felt very small again, and about to be chastised for skateboarding in the kitchen- same stomach-clenching tension, same anticipation of the sky falling down on him, but not quite sure if it really would.

Splinter exhaled slowly "I do not wish to make you feel uncomfortable, my son," he said. The tone of his voice was meant to be comforting, the soft, calming way he spoke to them when they were ill or hurt. "What is past is past. There is no more I can do for that part of your life that has gone by, despite my wishes and regrets on that issue. Instead, I must talk to you about the progress you have made in healing yourself- and my concerns about it."

Michelangelo lifted his head at that, curious. "What…what do you think is wrong with me?" he asked, feeling a prickle of unease at the pit of his stomach as he waited for the response. It wasn't, at this point, that he was suffering from the fear of discovery. No, he'd decided that if Master Splinter hadn't found out so far, he wasn't going to now that all of his problems seemed to be hitting a more comfortable plateau. This was more similar to the fear of a recovering patient in a hospital, being told by a doctor that they needed to talk about his illness. What if Splinter had spotted something else, something Leonardo couldn't, and it was even more difficult to fix? It was a fear of relapse.

"I can not say," Splinter said, gently, his voice like a finger touching something fragile, "I don't know what caused your problems. Without knowing the source of your unease, your emotional disruption, I can not say what has happened to you, nor can I attempt to guide your way to fix it. I can only say that, although you have healed the physical results of your depression, the conflict in your heart is still very much alive. In some ways it has diminished, yes, but your emotions are still not in balance, and your mind is still caught in the turmoil that drove you down the road of self-harm."

When Michelangelo made a sound of protest, he continued quickly, "I do not mean that you intentionally went forth to harm yourself, but your actions have caused great harm to yourself nonetheless. "

He remembered the hazy greyness of those months and the way his arms looked, strangely thinner, his eyes hollow in his face, and nodded with slow, regretful acceptance.

"I am glad that you accepted the aid of your brother in this, and that you have healed your body," he said, and rose to his feet, stepping down so he was right next to him. He rested his hand on his shoulder. "But now you must concentrate on relieving the tension, bringing peace to the war inside yourself. You might believe that this is something like- an injury that will heal itself in time with no help from you, or a scar that you can live with without it causing any harm, but you can not continue this way. You are now on a precarious path, and while I hope I can save you from falling, it is entirely up to you whether or not you accept my outstretched hand."

Michelangelo shifted, not sure how to respond. It felt too sudden, putting him on the spot and he wasn't sure what answer was right. Wasn't sure if the 'right answer' was really what he wanted. "Master-" he started, looking up quickly, a step away from babbling like an idiot again. Probably about the latest TV shows, which he knew was an awful segue from a serious conversation, but he felt himself about to talk about it to do something about the tension, and he was going to get a solemn Look of Disappointment-

Master Splinter just shook his head. "Do not give your answer to me now, my son," he said, "Such a thing must be thought over. Only know that your answer must be your own. I realize that now is the time you must begin to do things for yourself, and solve problems by your own power. You are growing up, and while I will be here to help you for as long as I can, your road is becoming one that I can not guide you along."

Something clenched in his throat, raw and stinging, and his eyes felt teary-hot. "Yes," he said, trying to keep it together, and put a hand over his eyes while he tried his breathing exercises to calm down. When his father held him, giving him comfort, he couldn't help feeling guilty. One more member of his family he was worrying, letting them down. _In this life we only have each other. If one of us falls-_ and he closed his eyes tightly, pushing the memory away.

* * *

Papers rustled as he sorted messily through the box he was sure, (fairly sure), was the one he'd stashed his paper and other paper-like, stationary-related products in. The room was still jarringly bare, most things packed away neatly in boxes from his neat spree. There they had remained due to his continued disinterest in turning to any of his previous hobbies.

A few of his designated comic book boxes were opened, and a couple of his comics lay on the floor from where he'd tried reading and gave up after the third fruitless attempt. His eyes would skim right over the words, barely noticing the script at all. Leaving the books where they lay gave him the feeling that he could always return to them later, even though he knew he probably wasn't going to.

Meanwhile, that same sense of apathy pretty much covered the entire range of free-time activities. He'd sometimes feel like playing a game or trying to scribble out a drawing of some comic book character, (copied from the book, and not drawn from memory,) and found himself losing interest about halfway through and abandoning what he was doing, only to spend the rest of his time with too much restless energy and no way to get rid of it.

So he'd taken on heading up to the surface to try and get it out, once he was considered good enough to head up there without endangering himself or the team. At first, one or all of his brothers would accompany him until they were sure he was fine without supervision and they felt they'd fully tested his ability to be safely independent aboveground. He wasn't entirely happy about their testing methods for this, though: tracking and attempting to capture him and bring him home. If they got him, he'd have to stay home all that night. If not, he was allowed to stay within the allotted time limit they had, depending on what time it was and what lessons they had that day. After a week or so of such treatment, he became very adept at finding supernaturally good hiding places and stealthily, but quickly, sneaking away.

Once he hit the rooftops, his routine was pretty simple. He'd just head the furthest from home he could, flinging himself into leaping roof from roof, using the landscape of the city's higher levels as his own personal track.

It was exhilarating, to race at top speed through the labyrinth of the rooftops, (some higher, some shorter, structure protruding and railings and sometimes clotheslines,) even better to feel that effortless use of muscles, athleticism and matrix-style gymnastics that kept him speeding, flying through the air and feeling it cool on his skin. When he was moving fast enough, he felt like the air had its own weight he had to push through. Funny to think of something as light as air having weight to it.

Still, it didn't feel like enough when he ended at the edge of his self-imposed boundaries, at the invisible fence that dictated the furthest distance he could separate himself from home. Standing there, watching the city bustle and go through business as usual, (along with the high crime rate business that at least kept him busy,) he would sometimes wonder if he was simply making attempt after botched attempt at running away.

One last paw through the box revealed a wrapped stack of envelopes and some lined paper, a bit wrinkled but otherwise intact. He lifted them up out of the rest of the random stuff, closed the cardboard flaps of the box, and pulled out one of the copic markers that he'd retrieved from the myriad of litter in the bottom of his 'art box'. A pen might be more appropriate, but that would mean he'd have to go down and sort through stuff in the main room, and he was having heavy-duty private time now.

From his belt, he pulled out three small cards fashioned from multicolored construction paper and decorated with lopsided pictures of a turtle in a cape. Letter for the Turtle Titan.

It had been surprising to see that he'd still been receiving these letters, even after being 'out of business' for so long. He'd never been particularly well-known, so that made the few pieces of mail he received even more rare. Seeing the letters that Silver Sentry had handed to him in their first meeting in god knew how long had made him feel uncomfortably guilty, especially when he found out that the kid who wrote the letters had been keeping it up for months. Looking at the face of the card, he noticed that the kid, (Connor, it said inside the card), had added raindrops in the crayoned sky and a very sad balloon-head with hair that he could only assume was meant to represent the boy himself, peering out on the edge of the card. Child language for 'I miss you'.

"You and me both," he told the picture, and started on a response. Connor deserved one for waiting this long for him. It was strange, and wrenching, that even one person still could think of him as anything like a hero.

The sound of polite knocking floated right past him at first. Usually when he happened to hear that sound, it didn't apply to him at all. This was because his brothers had obviously taken up an apprenticeship with Hun and learned his patented way of getting through doors: by plowing straight through without any regard for the people behind them. When the knock repeated itself a bit louder, he straightened up. "Yeah?" he asked, wondering if some new apocalyptic event was brewing.

Leonardo walked in and he decided there totally, definitely was.

"Do my eyes deceive me?" he asked in tones of utter shock, "Do I see Leo walking through my door after knocking? _The_ Leo? When were you initiated into the religion of door manners? What aliens captured you and brainwashed you into it?"

Leonardo rolled his eyes. "Very funny."

'Of course it was," he answered. "Time for practice again?"

"No, the others wanted to go up and get some ice cream, so I came to see if you wanted to come-" his voice trailed off, and Michelangelo was too involved in writing his amazing response letter to see Leonardo reach for one of the cards. He heard paper shifting against paper, and looked up to see him reading one, eye ridges furrowed slightly. "What's this?"

His hand twitched in the automatic response to make a grab for it, but he figured it didn't matter at this point anyway. "A note," he said, holding his hand out and waiting for it to be returned. "It's mine," he added pointedly, "Came through express and everything. Also, it's not gonna blow up and endanger the world, so…yeah."

"Is this _fan mail_?"

Leonardo sounded caught somewhere between surprise, interest, and amusement. The first two, he could handle, but he didn't feel like dealing with the last, not with this. He snatched the card out of his hand and slid it into his sketchbook.

"Something like that," he said, almost defiantly. "It's superhero fanmail," he added deliberately, "For superheroes. By kids who like superheroes. The superhero in question being me. So, yeah. All non-superheroes and superhero-haters, please get out of the superhero clubhouse. Because it's for superheroes," he added, probably somewhat unnecessarily.

"Sounds like he misses you," Leonardo said, not responding to the incredibly obvious attempt to shoo him away.

Not knowing how to respond to that, he folded the note he'd written and slid it into an envelope. After a short pause with neither of them talking and the awkward factor stretching out unbearably, he opened his mouth and resigned himself to what was bound to be yet another Mikey Ramble in Self Defense.

"I used to pick these up a lot," he said abruptly. "Not- all of them were mine, obviously. I meant, for the others. Usually they don't exactly get responses, but they all got delivered. Um, I got a few, might still have them somewhere in one of these boxes. One of the perks of being a superhero: ninjas are great and all, and stealthy 'creature of the night' stuff is definitely cool, but you can't say we ever get fanmail."

"No," Leonardo said dryly, "We certainly don't."

"Well, you do. Except yours comes delivered by arrows and other sharp things to the head. That must be ninja fanmail. Superhero fanmail," he said with conviction, "Is much better."

"Less dangerous at least," Leonardo agreed.

"I mean, I know you don't like superheroes for some reason," he started.

Leonardo looked puzzled. "I don't _not like _superheroes," he said, "I mean, I get along fine with them and Silver Sentry seems nice."

"Okay, then you don't like them in theory," Michelangelo corrected. "You used to have this face I would call 'the superhero sneer'. And it didn't come around in full force when I had my comics out, or when I was watching Batman or something on TV, but if we saw one of them fighting crime or doing good right in front of our eyes, out comes the patented Leo Superhero Sneer. That used to confuse the heck out of me. I mean, it's not like you support burning buildings or car robberies or people in tights trying to take over the world. So why would these nice, awesometastic, if badly dressed, people get on your nerves so much? I swear you were cursing their existence in your head!"

Leonardo cleared his throat. "I don't dislike them," he said, looking like he was sorting through his head for a way to put the remainder of the statement he was about to make. "I just…disapprove of their methods."

"Their methods? Like the way that water guy totally doused the burning building? Or the way they solved that drunk driver the other day? Or the way they keep popping up and keeping people from getting mugged and basically do everything we do? The way they stand for truth, justice, and the American Way? Leo, you practically ARE a superhero! You're, like, the brooding anti-superhero who stands off in the shadows and hates on the others. Almost everything they do you'd totally approve of. You know, that greater good thing you for some reason can talk about better than me."

Leonardo, looking like he could just not believe that they were even having this conversation, narrowed his eyes. "They're…flashy," he said, "I mean, they make a huge show out of everything. They wear neon colors and unusual outfits and outlandish hairstyles, and they speak like they don't even take _themselves_ seriously. Everything is completely out in the open for them, and it's…like they treat everything like it's a big scene in the comic books. They grandstand."

Michelangelo looked at him for a second. "So, you're saying that you don't like superheroes because they do everything you'd want to do, and they do it with style?"

Rolling his eyes, Leonardo waved his hand. "Forget it. I'm…glad to see that you're going back to it. I didn't even know you did stuff like this," he said, gesturing to the letter and the cards, "I mean, I didn't think you went out as...in your outfit that much."

"Why would you?" he asked. He hadn't added any bite to his words, but it left a silent hole in the conversation anyway, a reminder that outside of something that really shouldn't have made them closer to begin with, they hadn't all that many common interests. That they hadn't seriously spoken together that much, they hadn't had the same bonding talks he had with Raphael or the casual pranksterism he'd shared with Donatello. The two of them were odd brothers out to each other, and that rift made it worse because they had nothing to really talk about when they were trying to avoid the obvious.

"So, ice cream," he said finally.

"Right," Leonardo replied, sounding a bit relieved, "Ice cream. Let's go before they leave without us and Raph eats it all." More normalcy he didn't feel right returning to so quickly.

He grinned at him anyway. "Sure," he said, "Let's get out of here."

_I've got to get out of here._

* * *

_I've got to get out of here._

That thought kept on picking at his mind while he went through his daily routine.

_I've got to get out of here._

_Out. Of. Here._

Running through his brain as he tried to keep things normal, balanced, clean and simple. Bothering him when he went through his exercises and downright tortured him on the edges of rooftops at night, the moon shining like a tiny flashlight through fog, and the city stretching out past his vision and leading out beyond, and he felt the crush of that invisible cage even more strongly.

It was like a constant, nervous voice in the back of his head as he felt himself sink into routine, quiet, repetitive, dull. He felt it prickle at his nerves when he realized that this might just be the rest of his life and he had nothing else to do but-

_Get out._

_If it's not working, don't keep going._

_Find another way._

And he smiled when it hit him, because it should have been such an easy thing to think of.

* * *

"I want to request something," he said to Splinter, no hesitation, no confusion, no fear. And then he told him.

* * *

"You don't need to do this!"

It would have all been so much easier, he decided, if he'd snuck out in the dead of night leaving nothing but a note.

He'd actually thought of that, too. It had a nice touch of the dramatic and it would completely get rid of the problem of anyone trying to persuade him out of it when he'd had his mind set on the matter. His will was firm, he was like stone, nothing was going to get in his way, and he was on a mission. He'd decided against it after the split second it had taken him to think of it, of course, but that still didn't keep him from longingly considering the possibilities sometimes.

Especially now.

Especially when Leonardo seemed dead set against allowing him to accomplish his very first independent task in who knew how long.

"I do need to do this," he said firmly, shoving another bulky sweater in his bag. "I don't think you know how much. If you did, you would be quietly congratulating me for taking so long to think of something so crazy obvious, instead of yelling at me. You shouldn't be yelling at me, you know. It might be bad luck. I could crash my car into a tree and then your last words to me would have been those. Which aren't really great last words, I should point out. You need to think of new ones."

Leonardo, who had been pacing like a madman for the last half hour and had run the gamut from an aborted attempt at a lecture, some yelling, some very earnest attempts at getting him to explain himself, and right back to yelling again, looked like he wanted very badly to breathe fire. In the absence of this fire-breathing ability, he exhaled very loudly and massaged his forehead. "Mikey…Mike, I don't understand why you find the need to leave the city. You were improving, we've made significant improvements since you last had any issues, and I thought…I thought you were becoming more comfortable. I mean, you didn't say anything to the contrary."

Michelangelo snorted. "Of course I didn't. What was I going to tell you? 'I'm sorry, I'm still thinking inappropriate thoughts?' Did you want all of the details? That _is_ the problem, Leo! I am having problems, and I can't talk to anyone about them except for you, and I'm afraid that- I'm afraid that if I keep on leaning on you, this could get out of control."

Leonardo shook his head firmly. "I wouldn't let it."

"Well, I wish I was in control of absolutely everything, like you," he snapped. Then regretted it. "Look, it's not like no one has done this before. I mean, you didn't just leave the city, you left the country. You went to Japan. JAPAN! I? Am going to New Jersey, for a grand total of two months. That's barely a vacation, Leo. Not that I think of this as anything like a vacation, because I _am_ serious about this."

"You're not ready!"

"Oh, and you were? How ready do I have to be to cross a state line? Didn't we already go to, like, OUTER SPACE?"

For the last half hour, he'd been trying to persuade Leonardo that this wasn't an attempt to run away. That was more difficult than he'd thought it would be, mainly because he wasn't really sure himself if that wasn't exactly what it was. What he'd planned wasn't haphazard or desperate. It might have started out as just an outline, (a road trip sounded nice), but with the recruitment of Donatello, he'd managed to get the little details under control, plan which roads to take, which security measures to use, what to do if he was spotted or pulled over.

It was two months in New Jersey, driving wherever he felt like and basically getting space. Right now, he felt like he desperately needed that: space, room to breathe, away from the heavy stagnation, the stifling craziness he felt himself slipping into deeper and deeper. He needed time to build, time to evaluate, time to recreate himself step-by-step and give himself time to mourn whatever he'd lost and deal with whatever he'd gained. He couldn't do that in the Lair, enclosed on all sides by concrete and piping and _Leo,_ and expect to come out of it sane. Depression was harder to be rid of than that, and he felt it still clinging to him like bits of a spider web.

Leaving might not be the right choice, but it was a better choice than staying.

Now, if only he could convince the hardheaded turtle in question, life could be pretty much okay.

"I need this to get my life back on track, Leo," he said quietly, "I need this because I feel out of control. I feel like I have no control, and everything I choose is because someone's, like, yanking on my strings like I'm a puppet. I can't live like that."

Leonardo's breath caught in his throat with a hiss, "You didn't say that. We could have done something else. Made up a different way of dealing with it."

They could have. But it would have still been them making the decisions and them trying to fit back the pieces of his life, and that wasn't the right way to go about fixing himself, even if it was a sight easier than the alternative.

Michelangelo wanted to tell him that he'd already leaned on them way too much, gave them too much of what should have been his burden to begin with. He wanted to apologize for doing that all along, from slacking off in practice to goofing off in missions to closing everyone out in something this important and letting it fall apart so quickly. He wanted to tell him that he needed to do this for himself but he also needed to do it for the team, for his family, because anything relying on him for support would eventually break, and he didn't want to be responsible for breaking his family.

It's not your fault, he wanted to say, but you'll blame yourself anyway, and I can't stand it.

He didn't say anything, and they both stood there, him holding the suitcase he'd finally managed to pack, Leonardo holding nothing but the emotional leash that kept him home, and they stood off. It was more like a fight than anything physical.

"You don't get to do this," he finally said to Leonardo, and watched his expression slowly settle into confusion, "You don't get to help me out and then not let me help myself out. I can't keep on letting you do it for me. I have to do it for me. I mean, you've done enough for me. It's my turn. Let me have my time."

He didn't know if his other brothers are listening on in this, he realized, and it's a wonder that he didn't mind so much anymore.

"All right," Leonardo finally said.

"I'll come back," he told him. "I promise." He said the last in Japanese, the language Leonardo seemed to find more concrete, more easy to believe in. He didn't intend to break it.

* * *

When he left, it was so early morning that it could still be considered night.

His brothers wished him good bye, good trip, other things like that. (In Donatello's case, a long list of everything he could possibly forget and he couldn't resist making the comment of: "Did you want me to bring clean socks, too?")

Raphael went misty-eyed like he was liable to do in mushy things like this, gave him an extra-hard pat on the shoulder, and told him to try not to crash the car.

His father shared a long look with him and he couldn't tell what it meant, but he had the feeling that he was beginning to be able to read those looks even better now. Then he, too, had wished him well, and he was left alone. 'Alone' wasn't the scary concept it used to be before.

They'd borrowed an extra car from Casey, and tricked it out with various useful bits of tech, courtesy of Donatello, who seemed to have made it his personal mission in life to make this trip run like clockwork. They tinted the windows, added nifty little compartments for various weaponry and a first aid kit that was probably a little overstocked. They made up a suitable food supply for him to start off with, and this went into a refridgerator-like compartment that still managed to fit into the car without them needing to ad any weird extensions to it. Michelangelo had taken to calling it 'the Mikey Bond-mobile'. The maps had been made, gone over with maybe ten different colors of hi-lighter and every landmark picked out carefully. A calling schedule had been established as well, so they knew he was safe and not being beseiged by the nefarious forces of evil while on the road.

When Leonardo came to say goodbye to him, they went stiff.

"So," he said.

"So," Leonardo said.

Not much they could say with the rest of the family there.

"I'll be all right," he told him. Leonardo nodded, and that was it. Hard to believe that here he was, about to leave, and the last thing he'd heard from him was going to be a 'so'. Then Leonardo reached out, like he was going to try the rough shoulder smack like Raphael had done, but stopped, slowed down, and just put his hand there. It felt like he was trying to steady him, or maybe just steady himself.

"Take care," he said, his voice going a little hoarse, and then quickly released him.

The road out of the city was crammed with traffic, and loud, and despite all of it he felt an exhilarating rush of adrenaline as he drove out of the city limits and onwards. He considered the road ahead of him but didn't make plans on it, didn't add details to it. He liked it better as the vague possibility of freedom.

He liked thinking of being alone, of being, for the moment, free. Maybe even, a little, he liked thinking about growing up.

Meanwhile, he wondered how long it would take for Leonardo to notice that he'd bedazzled his katana hilts before he left home.

(He didn't want to think of growing up too much, after all.)


End file.
